I can’t tell what Stackhouse intends with the sentence just before the parenthesis. Is he implying that if Marsh had ruminated a bit more, he might have concluded that a pursuit of friendship as intense as Bonhoeffer’s must have been fueled by sexual desire (thus lending credence to the idea that Bonhoeffer was gay, albeit celibate)? Or is Stackhouse rather suggesting that more interrogation on Marsh’s part would have shown our suspicion of Bonhoeffer’s being gay to be a post-gay-rights-era preoccupation, all too ready to classify people as either “gay” or “straight” and not attuned enough to the complexity, even for “straight” people, of desire in simple friendship? As I say, I can’t tell, but I’d like to continue the conversation.
In any case, as I’m nearing the end of working on my friendship book, I can say that reading Bonhoeffer and Bethge’s correspondence was one of the richest experiences I had in the course of my research. Other than Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, I doubt there was a book that taught me more about friendship than Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. What struck me in reading it, perhaps in contrast to Marsh and Stackhouse’s views, was how unwieldy our categories are””either “homosexual” or “just friends”””when it comes to classifying a relationship as profound as Bonhoeffer and Bethge’s was.
I am baffled by this (although I have not read the book). Bonhoeffer was engaged to Maria von Wedemayer who after the war studied at Bryn Mawr. She kept his love letters and some of them have since been published. I am drawing on memory here, but seem to remember that some of the most moving Letters and Papers from Prison are addressed to her. Trying to make Bonhoeffer gay is another case, I suspect, of fitting someone from the past into our contemporary moulds. Weimar Germany was not exactly unaware of same-sex relationships, but even so I suspect that a respectable upper middle class family like the Bonhoeffers would have expected a strongly disciplined life for their adult children – with the possible result that emotions were channelled into friendships that remained exactly that.
One of the worst effects of the homosexualist movement has been the damage done to friendship. It makes all kinds of unwarranted assumptions about friendships, particularly about close friendships. It assumes that everything is sexual.
No. 2: That may be part of it, but I have noticed a more benign explanation:
We seem to have lost sight of an important fact. Fifty or more years ago, men traveled together and roomed together in a way that today in biographies brings accusations (or suggestions) of homosexuality. But I know of men who did that (heterosexual men who later married) for moral reasons. Today we expect young men and young women to travel together and have a great time. We retroject that attitude back into earlier periods, when men avoided other-sex intimacy before marriage in order to be honorable and try to do the right thing.
Agree with all three comments here. I find it so tragic that our culture is quickly losing any notion that one can have an “intimate” and yet non-sexual friendship.