The point where the homoerotic subtext almost breaks through - in The Search for Lost Time

Let's figure this out: the narrator (M.) in Marcel Proust's "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" (2nd volume of In Search of Lost Time) observes a "gang" of beautiful girls walking on the esplanade, is overwhelmed with desire, wants to meet them, so decides to go to the restaurant where he believes they dine, Rivebelle, with his (older) friend, St.-Loup, and at the restaurant gets very drunk, over-tips, makes eye contact with various women who are alone and whom he believes to be "loose" or at best in between loves/affairs and looking for someone new, but he doesn't act on any of these desires, doesn't meet anyone in fact - so what's this about? Could it be that the real object of his desire is St.-Loup? This may be the point in the 7-volume series when the homoerotic subtext comes closest to breaking through the surface and becoming the guiding principle of the novels. St.-Loup, oddly, has a girlfriend, supposedly, an actress, supposedly, who's off in some other town, and he goes off to visit her regularly - but oddly she never visits him and M. never sees her. Does it sound to you like she may not be a girlfriend at all? Proust is probably the greatest writer of all time in the use of indirection - what he doesn't tell and doesn't describe is as powerful a presence in his work as what he does - and the great unexplored continent of the Search is the homoerotic desires of the narrator, M. - But why did Proust choose to structure the novel as hetero-erotic - a convention of the time?, a requirement for literary publication in that time? the same crushing restriction under which Forster lived and labored, or didn't, for so many years? or an artistic decision - a way of broadening the cast and scope of the Search?