The Morality of Belonging
When Conditional Love Costs More Than Solitude
There is a moment in every marginalized person's life when the weight of performed belonging becomes unbearable. When the careful choreography of acceptable identity, the measured words, the swallowed truths, the smile that never quite reaches your eyes, all collapse under the simple recognition that you have been dancing for an audience that was never going to love the real you.
This July, in the wake of Pride month but under the continued shadow of the most comprehensive assault on LGBTQ+ rights in decades, I find myself at that moment. Not just personally, but witnessing it ripple through my community like stones thrown into still water. The ripples are beautiful and terrible. They reveal the true shape of things.
I have spent forty-one years learning the intricate steps of conditional belonging. The careful modulation of voice and gesture. The strategic selection of pronouns when discussing my partner. The practiced deflection when strangers make assumptions about my life. The emotional calculus I witness in others who scan rooms before showing affection, who measure their words at workplace gatherings, who navigate the constant question of how much truth any given relationship can bear. I became an expert in the economics of acceptance, always calculating the cost of authenticity against the price of rejection.
But writing has changed something fundamental in me. Through The Morality of..., I have discovered my own voice, and with it, the terrible clarity that comes from naming shame and fear as exactly what they are. Not character flaws. Not personal failures. Not divine punishment. But the predictable psychological wounds inflicted by systems designed to make certain people feel like they don't belong.
The current administration's systematic dismantling of LGBTQ+ protections, from healthcare access to educational inclusion to basic civil rights, represents more than policy disagreement. It constitutes a deliberate campaign to render us homeless in our own country. When politicians and their supporters vote to strip our rights, they are not engaging in abstract governance. They are actively working to ensure that people like me have no place we can safely call home.
Charles Taylor (1931-), the Canadian philosopher whose work bridges political theory and moral philosophy, offers a framework for understanding why this moment feels so profoundly destabilizing. In "The Ethics of Authenticity" (1991), Taylor argues that authenticity represents one of the highest moral goods in modern democratic societies. Yet Taylor recognizes that authenticity cannot exist in isolation; it requires what he calls "horizons of significance," shared frameworks of meaning that make individual choices matter.1
"Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self," Taylor writes. "It supposes such demands."2 But what happens when those very demands, those social frameworks that should support authentic living, instead require the systematic denial of who you are? What happens when belonging demands the abandonment of authenticity as its price?
Taylor's insight reveals the particular cruelty of conditional belonging for marginalized communities. We are told that authentic living represents the highest good, yet we are simultaneously required to abandon authenticity to gain social acceptance. We are promised that democratic societies value individual dignity, yet we discover that our dignity depends entirely on how well we can disguise the aspects of ourselves that make others uncomfortable, instead of building the pluralistic communities that true democracy requires.
This contradiction creates what I have come to understand as the impossible mathematics of marginalized identity. Every interaction requires complex calculations. How much truth can this relationship bear? How much of myself can I reveal without losing what little acceptance I have gained? How long can I sustain this performance before the weight of hiding destroys something essential in me?
But Taylor's framework also suggests a path toward resolution. If authenticity requires horizons of significance, then perhaps the answer isn't to keep dancing for audiences that will never truly see us. Perhaps the answer is to find new horizons, new communities, new frameworks of meaning that don't require us to fragment ourselves as the price of admission.
Taylor's ethics of authenticity finds powerful critique and expansion in the work of bell hooks (1952-2021), the American author, professor, and social activist whose writing on love, community, and resistance illuminates the collective dimensions of authentic living. In "All About Love: New Visions" (2000), hooks argues that authentic love, whether romantic, familial, or communal, requires the recognition and nurturing of each person's full humanity.3
"Love is an action, never simply a feeling," hooks writes. "And the action of love is always to will the spiritual, emotional, and material growth of the beloved."4 This definition reveals the fundamental falseness of conditional belonging. When families, communities, or institutions claim to love us while demanding that we hide essential aspects of ourselves, they are not practicing love at all. They are practicing a form of emotional colonization that mistakes control for care.
hooks' framework helps explain why the demand for LGBTQ+ people to earn acceptance through performance feels so spiritually violent. True love, true community, true belonging doesn't require anyone to amputate parts of themselves. It doesn't ask people to shrink, to hide, to perform palatability as the price of acceptance. When communities demand such performances, they reveal that their love was never real, never complete, never worthy of the sacrifice it requires.
This understanding transforms how I see the relationships that have shaped my life. People who express discomfort with certain aspects of others' identities while claiming love reveal the conditional nature of their acceptance. The religious communities of my youth that welcomed people while requiring them to remain silent about essential parts of themselves were not offering belonging but a form of spiritual apartheid. Many people find themselves in relationships that maintain warmth and connection while carefully skirting the deeper truths that would allow for genuine intimacy.
The most painful recognition has been how thoroughly I internalized these conditional terms. For decades, I believed that earning acceptance required me to make myself smaller, more palatable, less threatening to other people's comfort. I thought the problem was my inability to perform normalcy convincingly enough. I blamed myself for the exhaustion that comes from constantly translating your life into acceptable narratives.
But hooks' vision of love as action that promotes growth reveals the truth: I was never the problem. The communities that required such performances were never practicing love. They were practicing a form of social control that mistakes tolerance for acceptance, that confuses inclusion with belonging.
The current political moment has stripped away any remaining illusions about these conditional relationships. When people vote for politicians who promise to eliminate LGBTQ+ rights, they are taking action that deliberately harms my community. When religious leaders preach about love while supporting discriminatory policies, they reveal the profound hypocrisy of their claimed values. When people ask others to "understand their position" on issues affecting basic humanity, they demonstrate that their love was always contingent on a willingness to participate in my own dehumanization.
I no longer pretend to respect religious institutions built on collective delusion. These are not sacred spaces but businesses selling comfort to people who refuse to examine their complicity in others' suffering. My tax dollars already fund schools where children are taught to hate themselves for who they love, yet we allow churches to do the same damage for free, wrapped in the language of divine love. They worship a god who watched six million Jews die in the Holocaust, who sends floods to devastate Texas communities and summer camps, who works in "mysterious ways" that always seem to harm the most vulnerable. When they say "God is loving but vengeful," do they hear the contradiction? Do they recognize they're describing an abuser? The same voices that preach about love while voting to strip away our rights, that speak of forgiveness while practicing exclusion, that claim moral authority while subsidizing hatred with their attendance and tithing. It's the most expensive social club in the world, where everyone pretends to love you, everyone performs virtue, and everyone's fake.
I dream of authenticity as the divine force that finally shutters every house of “worship,” where truth becomes the exodus that empties these hollow sanctuaries. I envision congregations awakening to their own worth, walking away from altars that demand they surrender their souls for counterfeit community. I imagine these monuments to manufactured virtue standing empty, their doors locked not by persecution but by revelation, the simple recognition that love doesn't require performance, that belonging shouldn't cost your authenticity, that the sacred exists wherever people dare to be fully human. I hope for institutions forced to close not because they were silenced but because they were finally seen, their congregations choosing authentic community over performed piety. The same courage required to walk away from institutions that demand performance is needed in every relationship that asks us to betray ourselves.
These losses feel enormous, but they also feel necessary. Taylor's ethics of authenticity suggests that staying in relationships that require constant self-denial ultimately corrupts both parties. The person forced to perform betrays their authentic self, while the person demanding such performance betrays their capacity for genuine love. These relationships become exercises in mutual deception, where everyone pretends satisfaction while experiencing the quiet desperation that comes from never being fully known or accepted.
The path forward requires what I can only describe as revolutionary self-respect. It means choosing relationships that celebrate rather than merely tolerate who I am. It means building community with people who understand that love multiplies when we bring our whole selves into relationship. It means refusing to subsidize other people's comfort with my own diminishment.
This doesn't mean abandoning hope for reconciliation, but it does mean fundamentally changing its terms. Forgiveness cannot precede accountability. Relationship cannot resume without acknowledging harm. Love cannot flourish while some parties are required to hide essential aspects of themselves.
For those who have participated in systems that demand conditional belonging from LGBTQ+ people, hooks' understanding of love as action provides a clear path forward. True reconciliation requires not just changed feelings but changed behavior. It means actively advocating for our full inclusion, not just passively accepting our presence. It means examining and dismantling the ways your institutions, your communities, your families have created environments where some people must choose between authenticity and belonging.
The religious communities that claim to value love while practicing exclusion must choose. Either embrace the full humanity of LGBTQ+ people or acknowledge that their version of love was always incomplete, always conditional, always false. Either become genuine advocates for our dignity and rights or accept that they have forfeited any claim to moral authority on matters of love and community.
Those who claim to love LGBTQ+ people while voting for our oppression must choose. Either take active steps to repair the harm their political choices have caused or accept that their love was always contingent on our willingness to accept second-class status in our own communities.
I have made my choice. I choose authenticity over acceptance, genuine community over conditional belonging, relationships that nourish my full humanity over those that require me to fragment myself for others' comfort. This choice has cost me some relationships, but it has revealed others with depths I never imagined possible.
There is profound beauty in discovering that you don't need to earn belonging from people who were never going to offer it freely. There is unexpected joy in building community with others who understand that true intimacy requires the courage to be fully seen. There is revolutionary power in refusing to subsidize systems that profit from your self-denial.
The marginalized communities I belong to practice what hooks calls "love as resistance." We create spaces where authenticity is not just permitted but celebrated. We build frameworks of meaning that honor the full spectrum of human identity and experience. We offer each other the kind of belonging that doesn't require anyone to amputate essential parts of themselves.
This is not the inheritance our society offers, but it is the one I choose to claim. Not the cramped belonging that requires constant performance, but the expansive community that invites your whole self into relationship. Not the conditional love that fluctuates with political winds, but the steady recognition that your humanity needs no justification, no explanation, no apology.
To those still caught between authenticity and acceptance, I offer this: The belonging you seek already exists, but it requires the courage to stop dancing for audiences that will never truly see you. It requires the revolutionary act of believing that you deserve relationships that celebrate rather than merely tolerate who you are.
To those who have participated in systems of conditional belonging, I offer this challenge: Examine whether your version of love actually nurtures the full humanity of those you claim to care about. If it requires them to hide, to perform, to make themselves smaller for your comfort, then you are not practicing love at all. You are practicing a form of control that masquerades as care.
The choice is before all of us. We can continue participating in systems that require some people to choose between authenticity and belonging, or we can build communities that understand these two goods as inseparable. We can maintain relationships based on mutual deception and diminishment, or we can risk the vulnerability required for genuine intimacy.
I have chosen authenticity, even when it costs belonging. I have chosen genuine community, even when it means smaller circles. I have chosen revolutionary self-respect, even when it requires difficult conversations and painful separations.
The inheritance I leave behind is not the cramped belonging offered by conditional love, but the expansive possibility of communities that practice love as hooks envisioned it: action that promotes the spiritual, emotional, and material growth of all people. Communities that understand belonging not as something earned through performance, but as something offered freely to anyone willing to bring their authentic self into relationship.
This is the morality of belonging: the recognition that true community requires the courage to be fully known and the wisdom to build relationships that honor rather than diminish our shared humanity. It is the understanding that anything less than this isn't belonging at all, but a form of emotional exile disguised as acceptance.
The dance is over. The performance has ended. What remains is the possibility of genuine relationship, authentic community, and the revolutionary belonging that emerges when we refuse to make ourselves smaller for others' comfort. This inheritance is available to anyone willing to claim it, to build it, to practice the kind of love that sees and celebrates rather than merely tolerates the full spectrum of human identity.
The question is not whether you deserve this kind of belonging. You do. The question is whether you have the courage to stop accepting anything less.
Bibliography:
1 Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
2 Taylor, Charles. "The Politics of Recognition." In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
3 hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow, 2000.
4 hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.