Gay novel wins Booker  October 20, 2004 - 9:28AM Booker Prize-
winning author Alan Hollinghurst.  Booker Prize-winning author
Alan Hollinghurst.  British author Alan Hollinghurst today won
the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary
awards, for his critically acclaimed gay novel The Line of
Beauty.  "This was an incredibly difficult and close decision,"
said the chairman of the judges, former Culture Minister Chris
Smith, after the 50-year-old Hollinghurst landed the Booker at
his second attempt.    In the boom years of the 1980s, Guest has
a passionate affair with a black council worker before falling
in love with a cocaine-addicted millionaire.  In the book's most
memorable scene, the hero dances with Thatcher at a party while
he is drugged up the eyeballs.  Chris Smith, Britain's first
openly gay cabinet minister, said of the panel's decision: "It
resulted in a winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly
written and gets under the skin of the Thatcherite '80s".  "The
search for love, sex