ABSTRACT
A set of albums by Amherst College and Harvard Law School student William Belcher Whitney provides richly adorned accounts of a bustling social life involving courting many women at once, bonding with classmates, participating in “masculine” activities such as sports, and upholding his family's social expectations as a “Whitney.” He would have been a fine prospect for marriage for many women at nearby all-female colleges, which encouraged their students to become dutiful wives and mothers who supported their husbands and tended the family's social profile. Only at a closer look does this cisgender narrative falter and reveal messages apparent to members of the LGBTQI+ community, while simultaneously upholding the appearance of active engagement in cisgender courting norms. This paper rebuilds Whitney's narrative in view of the album's subcultural meanings, and it examines Whitney's struggle to conform to hegemonic norms. Collage, it will be argued, allows metaphors to enjoy a more tangible form, while speaking in the language of a genre (the photo album) that had an established cisgender normativity. This is to say, collage enabled Whitney to use the visual language of a heteronormative cultural artifact (the album) to subvert its usual expectations while being in the closet in plain sight.
