As a hormonal, nerdy teen girl I read James Kirkwood Jr.'s “Good Times, Bad Times” and had a mad fantasy crush on Jordan, the sensitive young man with heart trouble. Narrator Peter, his friend, wasn’t so bad either. I daydreamed many a scenario where I had a passionate affair with one or the other of them.
I read the book again years later and realized I had completely overlooked the homoerotic overtones. Not only were Jordan and Peter out of my reach because they were fictional characters, had they somehow come to life exactly as written, I wouldn’t have met their criteria for romantic involvement. Dammit!
(I have mixed feelings about the book now. It was in some ways a wonderful novel; I wasn’t the only one who identified strongly with it. But the plot was ultimately self-loathingly anti-gay; had the author (gay himself) written the same book at a time more accepting of homosexuality surely he wouldn’t have tied the headmaster’s evil to his sexual orientation.)