How to make sense of Marcel's obsession with Gilbert in In Search of Lost Time

Is there any way to explain the strangeness of narrator Marcel's obsession with Gilbert Swann, in Marcel Proust's "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower": a peculiar and unique quality of Proust's passionate feelings? A convention of the time and place? a cryptic literary heterosexual enactment of feelings that in fact were homoerotic? One essential strangeness of the relation is that the narrator, though age is undefined, has to be about 12-14 - careful readers will note that when M wrestles with Gilbert over possession of some object (a photo?) he ejaculates. We're told Gilbert is 14. Yet: the social conventions around their relationship would suggest they're much younger: M. looks forward daily to going to the Champs-Elysee to "play" with Gilbert - as if they're little children. In fact, he needs to be accompanied by the maid, Francois. So that all makes no sense. Yet: Proust's description of M's yearning for Gilbert and his fixation of what Gilbert's parents really think of him is the sentiment of a much older child, a teenager or precocious 12-year-old maybe. The only way I can make sense of it is to read the novel on one literal level and then to "read" the unspoken text of the novel - M. is really yearning to see a boy his age with whom he's fallen in love. That would explain why the friendship is encouraged, conventional, within the social boundaries - but also explains why M. is so tortured about this relationship - it's an erotic attraction that he feels he must keep hidden - though we learn over the course of In Search of Lost Time that homo-eroticism is far more prevalent in the highest reaches of Parisian society than the young M. can imagine.