My Years With Proust - Day 652

But I was convinced that Saint-Loup's physiological evolution had not begun at that period and that he had then been still exclusively a lover of women.  More than by any other sign, I could tell this retrospectively by the friendship that Saint-Loup had shown me at Balbec.  It was only while he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship.  Afterwards, for some time at least, to the men who did not attract him physically he displayed an indifference which was to some extent, I believe, sincere - for he had become very curt - but which he exaggerated as well in order to make people think that he was interested only in women. . . . That Robert's love may have hovered at times on the boundary which divides the love of a man for a woman from the love of a man for a man was quite possible.  In any case, the memory of Rachel now played only an aesthetic role in this context.  It is indeed improbable that it could have played any other.  One day Robert had gone to see her to ask her to dress up as a man, to leave a lock of hair hanging down, and nevertheless had contended himself with gazing at her, unsatisfied.  He remained none the less attached to her and paid her scrupulously, though without pleasure, the enormous income which had had promised her and which did not prevent her from treating him in the most abominable fashion later on.  This generosity towards Rachel would not have distressed Gilberte if she had known that it was merely the resigned fulfilment of a promise which no longer bore any trace of love.  But love was, on the contrary, precisely what he pretended to feel for Rachel.  Homosexuals would be the best husbands in the world if they did not put on an act of loving other women.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 700-701

Marcel continues to process the discovery that his friend Robert is gay or is bisexual - or at the least is not the womanizer that he appears (and apparently promotes).  His theory is that Robert underwent a "physiological evolution" and at one time he was "still exclusively a lover of women."  More likely, obviously, Robert was simply being more honest with himself or at least more honest with those around him, or if not more honest with those around him then just a little sloppy in attempts to hide his sexuality (which we also saw with M. de Charlus).  What Marcel is struggling with is how close friends they were at Balbec, which also takes the form of a regret that they were no longer as close.  Writing about Robert, Proust proposes, "It was only while he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship." So, when Robert admitted to himself that he loved men he would then hold men at a distance.  Would this be because men had suddenly switched categories and were now in the Possible Sex Partner category, much like teenage boys who suddenly drop girls as friends because they've entered that same category?