JOSHUA ADAIR

Out of Time:
Queer Communities at the Flea Market

I am a bicentennial baby who never drove a car manufactured after 1965 until I was an adult. Most of my formative years were spent in an 1897 Folk Victorian house furnished with antiques that would have been old-ish when the house itself was built. In almost everything we, my siblings and I, were the only "new" feature of our family life. For better or worse, in our small Illinois farming community, we were conspicuously out of time with almost every aspect of life in the 1980s and 1990s.

I cannot confidently—or convincingly—confirm that we were living as if it were another time to be cool or catchy. Today it isn't difficult to drop into one social media account or another and find an entire community of folks who have seemingly made things like "vintage," "thrifting," and "throwbacks" their entire identity—virtually, anyway. I'm uncertain at this remove of decades, however, that an exact (or even comparable) analog parallel can easily be made in regards to us having formulated our collective identity based on the fact that so much about our lives was old—and to some—outlandish. And yet, I often find myself reacting defensively when I see how gleefully twenty- and thirty-somethings today embrace collecting vintage and/or antique housewares, clothing, and cars as signifiers of a full-fledged identity. For many of them, it seems that a considerable aspect of their sense of self rests upon resisting (but also unavoidably creating?) contemporary culture through the acts of collecting and creating a life out of the detritus of the past.

My defensiveness comes from being drawn into their highly stylized and extremely self-conscious identity constructions; they appear to present the kind of deep-seated faith in the powers of beauty and domesticity to which I have always ascribed. And yet, they also manage to seem unoriginal, formulaic even. For instance, how many people need to proclaim their fiendish obsession with owning those avocado, orange, and brown-hued mushroom kitchen canisters from the seventies before that type of taste becomes hackneyed? My grandmother owned those for years, and they never seemed to be the key to a happy life. These collectors seem to largely avoid or overlook the context from which those objects came—preferring to imagine themselves, somehow, as discoverers and/or originators. At the most basic (and undeniably petty) level, they always leave me muttering insults about how they didn't invent collecting and could not even begin to understand the world that they claim (directly and indirectly) to have created.
           
I didn't invent it either, but "at least I know that!" I often tell myself in my most curmudgeonly, age-is-advancing, self-important voice. And then I circle back to feeling something akin to envy for these young people who seem to feel so empowered by building an identity out of the past. That process (practice?) shouldn't annoy me so; after all, it is the primary narrative of my (and my family's), life. I wonder, then, if some of my pique doesn't center upon questions of originality and agency. Is their embrace of collecting as an identity, time-worn as it is (though they seem not to know it), trying to me because I have never lived outside that world? What does it mean when these collectors carry on our family's—and their communities'—ways of being rather than rejecting them and opting for something somehow new? And, ultimately, is there some inherent, intrinsic value in living—and loving—the past, or at least its material culture?

Past Perfect

As I near my own half-century mark, I cannot recall a time before I understood that my family and our way of life was significantly different than most people's in our community. I was always aware that my parents were originals, or at least unusual, in some sense. This realization was not an altogether satisfying one though it was not without its satisfactions. As a queer, working class kid, I never felt like I fit in anywhere, but this foundational difference in my family as a collective may have helped me learn how to deal with my own difference. It certainly taught me how to cope with being conspicuous, whether you wanted to be or not. There was never a choice for us; our difference announced itself endlessly—most often as an errant muffler or screeching brake pads. Other times, it was the flicker of oil lamplight through our windows or the fact that we always carried our homemade lunches to school rather than eat cafeteria food. Perhaps we had just always failed to assimilate.
           
Spend any time around antique cars, and you will quickly learn that maintenance never ends. You will also understand in no time that "car guys"—as my dad always calls his collector community—don't exactly care about the trouble that this particular fixation causes their families. In childhood, it was never a question of if the car would break down; it was always when. The answer to that spur of endless existential dread was usually "at the worst possible time." For example, if you take a 1956 Chevrolet Bel-Air to your children's Christmas music program, you can almost certainly guarantee that it will self-immolate in the school parking lot just as every single member of the community has emerged to serve as witness. The resulting screaming and belching (of the car, not the witnesses) will guarantee weeks of fodder for friends who couldn't figure out why the Adairs drove vehicles older than most of their parents. In time, our friends and classmates would become quite accustomed to such overtly humiliating public displays—with our strategic use of shrubberies as speed bumps during a brake failure ranking as an all-time fan-favorite.
           
My parents clearly made some choices (insert a mostly affectionate eye roll emoji here). Those choices were heavily informed by matters of style and taste; they were also influenced by nostalgia and the lure of nonconformity. There was something cool about it to them (more about this shortly), but it was also an economic necessity. My parents were hardworking, creative, poor people who used their skills and talents to create their version of a beautiful, if not always entirely operational, life. I don't think it's the case that they learned to love old cars, houses, and furniture because they were all we could afford, but it also didn't hurt that their tastes were somewhat attuned to their means.
           
It's a complicated business trying to attribute motivations and mentalities decades after the fact—especially when one's perceptions are influenced by love and deep familiarity, among other things. However, I do know that as their financial position improved incrementally, their manner of living did not alter in any significant way. They embraced a strong relationship with the past that was likely equal parts preservation/protection and fantasy. In some sense, they were world-making by pulling the past into the present and defiantly making it work even as they were made figures of fun by many.
           
But they were heroes to others. Tooling around in our antique cars, for example, drew relentless attention. While the mechanical systems and the interiors of our automobiles were usually a work in progress (or exercises in inertia), Dad usually saw to it that the exteriors looked great. He managed these appearances by teaching himself (starting when he was a kid) to do all aspects of body work, including paint jobs. When he wasn't moonlighting on auto repairs for extra money, he was working on one of those cars. Well, we all were. Unlike most families, ours worked pretty much ceaselessly.

Dad held a regular job as a diesel mechanic during the days and took on all manner of work at night. Until my brother, sister, and I were teenagers, mom worked from home babysitting, crafting, and sewing for money. She also kept books and did the billing for dad's business. And, typical to the time, she kept house and yard in addition to caring for ailing family members and contributing to the community. In the evenings, we all worked in the garage on whatever needed to be done. We kids earned $1 an hour for degreasing parts, sorting bolts, sanding cars, and sweeping floors. All of us, save dad, played "gopher" (really "go for") doing whatever he told us to do, including calling customers, fetching beverages, and running errands. We all had to work, regardless.

Of course, none of those gawking onlookers or adoring fans understood the intensity of the labor involved in keeping a 1950s car running and looking good. They also could not discern that my father was often driving by sitting on a milk crate (!) rather than an actual car seat or that his feet could be dragging the ground thanks to failing floorboards. Instead, they became instantly fixated on asking about the car's age, make, model, engine size, top speed, and so forth. My father's peers were clearly envious and imagining themselves as the driver (likely without the wife and kids). Later, when I was driving those cars solo (usually a '55 Chevrolet Bel-Air), I would routinely curse my father every time I pulled up to a stoplight or a gas pump as I was interrogated by some wannabe classic car zealot. In some ways, I resented that attention far more than the endless breakdowns. It didn't matter though; that was the public-facing part of our life and beyond the edges of our own community, those cars definitely connected us to a larger one.

That connection was further extended by my mother's love of antiques—especially early country pieces. My parents' identities intersected in this way. Knowing full well that those events guaranteed him a bevy of enthusiastic fans, my father loved nothing better than showing up at a flea market or swap meet in one of his cars. The rest of us usually lost patience with the egotism of his need for all that car attention, but mom and I appreciated that it kept him distracted while we schemed and bargained to bring home a treasure or two.

In many ways, that world has largely been lost to us. Even as so-called influencers purport to "discover" thrifting, collecting, and decorating with antique and vintage wares, these practices were prominent across the twentieth century in various iterations and with varying degrees of widespread interest. My childhood happened to coincide with the boom period of the 1980s and early 1990s when antiques were popular with certain groups and before the internet had destroyed some of the grander illusions and mysteries of collecting. What was understood to be "rare" or at least "hard to find" thirty or forty years ago has often been revealed to be easy to find. While that shift in awareness isn't highly relevant here, it does bear mentioning because it helps to illustrate a culture that has mostly ceased to be in the intervening years.

Cast Your Mind Back

I've spent my entire life collecting. My cousin, fifteen years my senior, to this day loves to tell me about how I, at three or four years old, would corner various family members and insist that they sit through my object lesson lecture about some items that I persistently carried around in a little blue case. I have no memory of that (apparently protracted) episode in my early childhood, but I can easily recall how, at perhaps seven or eight years old, I took the money I'd earned child-laboring as a parts degreaser to a flea market at Argyle Lake State Park that we attended each Labor Day weekend. It was a favorite of ours and a highlight of late summer because it always felt like it ushered in the autumn season even though it tended to be unbearably hot most years.
           
There were a handful of these sorts of flea markets that we saved for and dreamed about for months each year. Most of them occurred in the fall months, were mostly held outdoors, and drew large crowds. They represented a stark contrast from the proper antiques shows that we also frequented, but only as window shoppers. Those events were exclusively indoors and usually well beyond our financial reach, including a large one that was always held in an early 1980s shopping mall about forty minutes from our house. While it's now difficult to imagine shopping malls as vibrant sites of culture given their current decrepit, disavowed place in our world, I find it even stranger to remember how we delighted in those winter antique shows situated among tropical plantings, water fountains, and countless adult smokers.
           
While the smokers were certainly still present at the outdoor flea markets, the rest of the atmosphere could not have been more different. For one, the Lake Argyle event was also a steam engine show, so there were countless old duffers pottering about, staring at and showing off their tractors, threshers, and whatnot. They were afforded primacy of placement, which meant we had to weave our way through all those hissing, spitting engines (and similarly steaming old men) to get to the good stuff. Under the pine grove, there were assembled endless rows of folding banquets tables of glassware and other collectibles, as well as numerous displays of all manner of antique furniture.

Those flea markets, first and foremost, were egalitarian spaces. They existed outside the predictable structures and strictures of our everyday world. All kinds of people were there for a variety of reasons. It sounds grandiose, but those events always had a kind of carnivalesque atmosphere, literally and figuratively. There air was imbued with the scent of funnel cakes, onion rings, and other fair foods. There was also a religious sect (I can't recall which) that always arrived with from-scratch baked goods—I always got a miniature pecan pie—and meat pies. There were big spenders and poor people, like us. It was a space for diversity in a time and place when people kept to their own kind.
           
The seven- or eight-year-old me made his first collecting purchase there. I spent my hard-earned five dollars on a small rectangular silverplate trinket box with red velveteen lining and vaguely cabriole feet. It was tacky, and I loved it. I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment having acquired it for myself, thus establishing a firmer affiliation with my parents and grandparents who were making their own acquisitions as well. That may well have been the year that my paternal grandfather opted to put his bargaining prowess on full display for us all as he bought a rather extensive collection of antique glass hens on nests. He somehow struck some absurd bargain (as he often did) and brought home nearly two dozen in a range of jewel tones for my mother and grandmother to display proudly.
           
In that atmosphere, among the collectors, there was an uncommon conviviality, a strong sense of impromptu community. My grandfather was not typically a generous or fun-loving man, but something about the spirit of the moment and our appetite for treasure hunting caused him to act out of character. I think he may have also drawn pleasure from the women watching him negotiate and murmuring how their husbands would never follow suit. Neither would he again, but he certainly didn't want them to know that—his performance was too powerful. For their part, my mother and grandmother must have enjoyed the envy they invited, for they were far more used to being the subject of jokes and ridicule for their tastes. Among their own kind, however, they held power.
           
My personal favorite vendor was Bonnie Edwards, though I could afford none of her wares. She lived in our little town of 250 people in a dreary 1970s ranch-style house that other people seemed to admire for its newness and practicality. The house had been built by Tadpole, her husband, as an attempt to neutralize her love for the past. Apparently, Bonnie had lived in a very old farmhouse prior to the ranch, and it was the perfect backdrop for her extensive Depression Glass collection. Like many women who grew up during the Great Depression, Bonnie harbored an enduring passion for the brightly colored, mass-produced glass of that era. Like my grandmothers, she and her family had been too poor to collect it at the time, and she sought to reclaim and rewrite that past by amassing as much as she could when her means permitted. My paternal grandmother had done exactly the same thing, locking cabinet after cabinet of the green glass away like a museum exhibit every time she could find an affordable piece at a country auction or local yard sale.
           
Bonnie's passion for the glass grew so profound, however, that Tadpole told her it had to go. He'd had enough of living in the past, and he wanted to live out his days in a contemporary house with up-to-date décor. Bonnie's Depression Glass went into countless banana boxes in the garage. They were piled from concrete floor to ceiling and meticulously labeled. Each spring, she would click the button to raise the state-of-the-art doors and commence a garage sale at the most exorbitant prices you can imagine. While she might not have been able to overpower her husband's insistence that she store her collection, she was committed to keeping it intact by price gouging.
           
When the garage sales didn't work, Tadpole demanded that she join the local flea market circuit and sell off the stuff. Each year, I would see her at Lake Argyle, and I always fell for her performance. The greens, pinks, and golds of her Depression collection were far too seductive to stay away. I can only imagine what she must have thought of the strange little boy from a few streets over who clearly shared her love of glass. In fact, many of the adults at these events didn't seem to know quite what to do with me, but it didn't take them long to suss out that I was actually serious even if I couldn't really compete. In the end, I think Bonnie did feel somewhat sorry for me—or maybe she just wanted to encourage a fellow collector—so she sold me several unspectacular green bud vases for a few dollars. It would be many, many years before I understood what an act of kindness that gesture had been.
           
In that moment, and so many others, flea markets became transformative, magical spaces for me. Because of our shared affinities, I managed to find a far greater sense of belonging in those places than almost anywhere else. After all, there were many other queer folks there shopping and dealing, even if they didn't explicitly announce their identities in those days. Plus, we suddenly became something other than outliers in that world; people understood our tastes and style and even envied our choices. We weren't alone in our antique transportation or our longing to live (at least part) of a life long since past. In turn, I could begin to see a kind of queerness, not entirely like my own but not utterly dissimilar either, in my family that helped to cement our kinship beyond just biology.

Past Present

Regrettably, our flea market love affair was always far too brief. Those market days accounted perhaps for three to five entries in a calendar year. Even now they hold outsized power and space in my memory because they were profoundly special to me. I loved that they were imbued with a sense of adventure, of conquest, of belonging; they helped me to believe that even in a world with a disinterested and/or disgusted majority that somehow minority types like me (and my family—albeit for somewhat different reasons) could still build worlds of our own—and to our own tastes. We could thrive despite failing to enter the mainstream. It's worth noting here, too, that my siblings were thoroughly disinterested in that entire aspect of our childhood and, decades later, still complain about how much my parents and I enjoyed it.
           
I continue to search for those spaces even as I collect mostly from eBay these days. This century has not been kind to the old-style flea markets as the generation responsible for their golden age have mostly passed on or at least retired by now. As tastes moved toward Modernist (midcentury) ideals, more and more elderly people decry the lack of interest in their collections and proposed dispersal of goods. Economic crises and world catastrophes have also completely reshaped how people think about antiques and most of the collecting community has moved online to face the pleasures and pitfalls endemic therein. Practically speaking, it's much easier for me to find what I'm looking for and have it shipped directly to my house. It's also easy to discover that most Depression Glass, for example, is plentiful and now sells in some cases for less than it did initially (mere pennies). My grandmothers must be spinning. I miss that world when things seemed more rare and special; it all seemed more authentic somehow.
           
And yet, glimmers of an antiques renaissance twinkle at the margins these days even as I grumble and gripe about new devotees' lack of awareness of history and its contexts. Maximalism seems to be the (admittedly annoying) buzzword on many designers' lips as influencers tout the green, sustainable nature of buying second-hand and preserving the past. In turn, they also kvetch about the recent uptick in prices and the loss of secrecy surrounding some of their prize picking grounds. They have yet to learn, it seems, about the nature of markets and making one's possessions popular enough that others wish to prize them as well. That, at least, amuses me, and I often think they probably need a Bonnie Edwards of their own to help find the way.
           
Ultimately, I suppose, this essay is equal parts lament and tribute for a small but highly significant aspect of my life that cannot be recaptured or fully replicated. I still go on the hunt whenever I catch the scent of an event that might measure up, but I'm usually left making comparisons that find the present lacking somehow. That may just be a symptom of the fact that there's always far more promise nearer the outset of a story, but it's also an illustration of just how rapidly life accelerated and changed for those of us born to Baby Boomers who are no longer young enough to set trends, nor are we old enough to be antiques.

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