The strangest character in Search of Lost Time

Isn't Charlus the strangest character in Search of Lost Time? He suddenly appears on the scene (I think he was at Balbec in vol 2 and a smaller role in vol 1, can't remember for sure) in vol. 3, The Guermantes Way, where he oddly approaches the narrator, Marcel, and says he needs to speak with him after the salon at Mme de Villeparisis's. Eventually, Marcel and Charlus leave the soiree together; Charlus says he will look for an appropriate cab - and lets several pass by as he talks to Marcel. He tells Marcel that he will guide him through life, but that first of all Marcel must stop wasting his time going to salons and catching on to the fringes of society. In a way, that's good advice - advice that Proust himself later took, as he "retired" from society to write his great novels - but it's about the most inappropriate and presumptuous statement I've ever read: who is he to be telling someone else how to live his life? What good can he possibly do for Marcel? Of course what we suspect is that he's coming on to Marcel in some oblique (slightly) and weird (totally) way. After just viciously attacking several people whom Marcel knows and criticizing his own sister as a social phony, anyone would wonder - who is this guy? He seems entirely unstable, and would be a complete social outcast but for his birth, his name and title. As we suspect now and later learn, Charlus is a closet - and later not so closeted - homosexual, which must have been torturous in his time and in his circle. His love for men must have made him feel an outcast, and must have filled him with bitterness and self-loathing - unlike Proust, who could turn his feelings of isolation and alienation into great art. Charlus is the anti-Proust - full of hatred and bitterness, in some ways completely repressed, and in others oddly open and flamboyant, in the way that only one of his class can be. He discusses "rent boys" with Marcel - a term in the fine Traharne translation that I am sure was not used by Moncrieff in his elegant and polished if perhaps slightly Bowdlerized Remembrance; and then the weirdness of the cab - after passing up on several totally suitable ones he selects a cab, going in the wrong direction, in which the driver appears out of control, and sits in the carriage rather than on the driver's seat - he gets in next to the driver and the two take off: obviously, certain "cabs" in that neighborhood were gay pickups. So why did he want Marcel to see him do that? He is declaring himself to Marcel in some way, and telling Marcel he recognizes a fellow closet-dweller, or emerger. By the end of the series, we will see that Charlus is also a sadist and a cruel person - a realization that Marcel comes to over time. What a friend.