"Roles like that don't turn up every week,” says young British actor Dan Stevens of his leading role in the BBC adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, which premieres Sunday night at 10 p.m. on Logo.

Stevens is probably right. He plays Nick Guest, a gay Oxford graduate who moves to London in 1983 to stay with a friend's wealthy family, and he certainly gets to run the gamut of emotions. In the first episode of the three-part adaptation, Nick is a virgin about to embark on a thesis about Henry James. He has only recently come out, and he is still capable of being overawed by the grand lifestyle of his adopted family, the Feddens.

By the second episode, set in 1986, Nick is a hardened character. He has been through his first relationship, with Leo, a black council worker. He has started an affair with Wani, the closeted son of a Lebanese millionaire, who is addicted to cocaine and cruising. Over the course of the story, Nick will taste the highs of the hedonistic '80s, including dancing with Mrs. Thatcher at a party while high on drugs. He will also taste the lows, as AIDS encroaches on the gay male community and the fortunes of the Fedden family begin to slide.

As much as Nick's romantic entanglements, the show is concerned with Nick's infatuation with the glamorous, upper-crust Feddens. Indeed, to right-wing characters within the story, Nick's level of attachment to the Feddens is sinister. They see it as an “old homo trick” for homosexuals to attach themselves to straight families. And they believe that Nick is envious because he cannot have a nuclear family unit of his own.

But Stevens strongly disagrees: “I think this idea of the Feddens and the sort of grand family has more to do with Nick's aesthetic ideals than his sexual ideals. He has very pure and honest expectations and desires for his romantic relationships.”

Nevertheless, Nick does wind up conducting a closeted affair. “He falls instantly in love with Leo and is heartbroken by him, and so he goes for Wani, someone he can never really have a fully formed relationship with,” Stevens says. “I suppose the heartbroken reaction to his first, very innocent, pure relationship is to go for something quite impossible.”

To Stevens, the story presents a contrast between two different ideas of what it means to be gay. “There is the romantic, 19th-century notion of homosexuality, which is this secret, indulgent, decadent, dandyish sort of lifestyle — the Wildean ‘love that dare not speak its name.' And almost the love that doesn't want to, that quite enjoys this secret lifestyle. Wani embodies this kind of hedonistic but underground life.”

He continues: “And then there is the sort of '60s, very much more modern view of homosexuality, almost parallel with feminism that, you know, actually gays were going to claim their rights and stake a place in society that was outspoken, loud, proud and visible.”

Stevens sees Nick as being caught somewhere between these two ideas: “Nick is very proud of his sexuality. He's completely unashamed of it, but his romantic and aesthetic ideals are more allied with the older world of homosexuality, which is sort of closeted and hidden in these beauteous surroundings.”

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