ABSTRACT
This chapter offers outlets for their various makers to express their unique life plights for an audience of family, friends, their subculture, or for themselves. Some of those makers’ stories – contextualized and retold in this volume by an equally diverse range of scholars from different disciplines, using a variety of methodologies – made the album into a subversive vehicle that transformed their makers’ liminal and marginalized “unbeings” into an undeniable “beings,” using a visual language of the privileged hegemony. Albums also were a bifurcated space for implying disappointment over one's single status, yet also for celebrating the freedom that being unfettered from raising children allowed. Documenting travel, however, conformed to existing travel-album-making norms. The acts of slicing, recombining, overlaying, and recomposing of objects from the external world and reassembling them enabled LGBTQI+ album-makers to create new, liminal spaces with a hybrid (and more accommodating) reality.
