Book Review: ‘Do Something,’ by Guy Trebay

Advertised as a coming-of-age story, Trebay’s beautiful book is more like a coming-to-terms story about his own fugitive needs. His New York of the 1970s was a place of ragpickers and performers, a Polaroid world of masquerade before AIDS, but also a period of seeming innocence before Reaganism changed the meaning of self-improvement.

Trebay brings those rather blurry times into focus, recalling “the imaginative, cinematic way in which people like Candy Darling experienced themselves in the special New York I am describing.” Everyone wanted to metamorphose, and the author, too, “without knowing into quite what.” He met with the writer Anita Loos and looked around Midtown for Greta Garbo, seemingly obsessed, quite naturally, with the essence of old photographs.

Trebay is an efficient and pleasingly wide-eyed guide to “the teeming microecology of downtown New York.” We hear of the Halston crowd, the Antonio Lopez gang, the Calvin Klein coterie, the Peter Hujar mob, the male model fraternity and a fading procession of no-hopers still hoping. It was a different time in America, “when qualifying for welfare was like winning a MacArthur Prize.”

Along the way, he nails a point that you won’t find in any tourist brochure. Great cities are not just myths, they are zones of actual experience. “Looking back,” he writes, “I see that there is something about the broke and crippled city that makes it hospitable to talent.”

Such subtleties may be altogether lost in today’s Darwinian melee, but Trebay’s people, the people of the 1970s and 1980s who characterized their Day-Glo city, were powerfully of their time, and many were what he calls “foremothers of renegade queerness.” It is perceptions like these that make Trebay’s book a bit of a summer treat, a memoir that, for all its fictive energy, returns a little political realness to the pre-election miasma.