I can\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s part would have shown our suspicion of Bonhoeffer\u2019s being gay to be a post-gay-rights-era preoccupation, all too ready to classify people as either \u201cgay\u201d\u009d or \u201cstraight\u201d\u009d and not attuned enough to the complexity, even for \u201cstraight\u201d\u009d people, of desire in simple friendship? As I say, I can\u2019t tell, but I\u2019d like to continue the conversation.<\/p>\n
In any case, as I\u2019m nearing the end of working on my friendship book, I can say that reading Bonhoeffer and Bethge\u2019s correspondence was one of the richest experiences I had in the course of my research. Other than Pavel Florensky\u2019s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, I doubt there was a book that taught me more about friendship than Bonhoeffer\u2019s Letters and Papers from Prison. What struck me in reading it, perhaps in contrast to Marsh and Stackhouse\u2019s views, was how unwieldy our categories are\u201d\u201deither \u201chomosexual\u201d\u009d or \u201cjust friends\u201d\u009d\u201d\u201dwhen it comes to classifying a relationship as profound as Bonhoeffer and Bethge\u2019s was.<\/p>\n