Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (Conclusion)

By this time, of course, besides being turned off by having to room with a sexist like Barry, whose 1970's political views and values did not reflect my own 1970's revolutionary left, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist non-Zionist and male feminist political views and values, I also had had enough of living again in Queens County.

Prior to the 1970's, I had grown up in Queens, lived in the Midwest and lived in Manhattan and Staten Island; and in the 1970's I had lived in the Bronx and the Midwest again, before finally returning to Queens County.

My childhood memories of growing up in the Douglaston and Little Neck area of Queens within the Beech Hills-Deepdale developments of low-cost, co-op garden apartments, during the 1950's era of U.S. white working-class affluence, were memories of a Queens in which I still felt on the same cultural wavelength as were most of my childhood friends, childhood classmates and childhood elders. But now in the 1970's, as an adult in my 20's who had become politically radicalized and alienated from culturally straight white suburban middle-class/affluent working-class values, I no longer felt I was on the same wavelength as the other adults in their 20's who still lived in Queens in the 1970's.

Between the 1950's and the 1970's, both Queens and I had changed; and by the 1970's none of the people I had grown up with in Queens seemed to ever appear in my daily or weekend life scenes in the 1970's; and there also seemed to be little likelihood that living any longer in Queens in the 1970's would enable me to easily find any new scene of people with whom I would feel some philosophical affinity, shared life aspirations or emotional closeness to.

So, naturally, when I heard from my sister, who was now living in Brooklyn, that there was a vacant apartment in Brooklyn that I could rent by myself for just $100 a month, my revisit to Queens ended. And to the more urbanized borough of Brooklyn/Kings County I moved my guitar, my cheap portable typewriter and the duffel bag that contained all my clothes, as a new year in the 1970's began.