GLR July-August 2024

famous than himself. But he cannot find his place in this glittery crowd until he goes to The Village Voice one day to apply for a job as an assistant to the woman in charge of “Listings” and discovers a place where he can get paid for what he really wants to do: write.

But nothing of heartache, or sexual obses sion, is revealed, though sexual indul gence was a huge part of 1970s New York. Gay life is rendered in an almost anthro pological way. To quote at length:

DO SOMETHING Coming of Age Amid the Gli tt er and Doom of ’70s New York by Guy Trebay Alfred Knopf. 256 pages, $29.

What is easy to forget now is that those Fac tory people were just one faction in the teeming microecology of downtown New York. There were many clans and I seemed for a while to float in and out of most. There was the Halston crowd of friends and rent boys and hangers-on and gorgeous young models and the amputees he occasionally hired to ful fill certain sexual needs, as well as the omnipresent Venezue lan artist and pest Victor Hugo. There was the joyous planetary system revolving around the light of Antonio Lopez, the Bronx-born Puerto Rican fashion illustrator ... the posse of male beauties scouted as models by the Hungarian Zoltan “Zoli” Rendessy for his maverick agency Zoli, men like Joe

This is TheVoice during its heyday, when people would line up on Astor Place to get the first issues of the weekly whose ads enabled them to find lovers, apartments, gurus—in ads that the Internet has usurped to the devastation of print journalism. Eventually, TheVoice lets him do what he really wants to do— wander around New York with the photographer Sylvia Plachy, searching out curiosities on his real subject of interest: New York. From 1981 to 1993, he writes vignettes for the paper, which are published in book form in 1994. The title— In The Place to Be: Guy Trebay’s New York —says everything you need to know about how he regards his hometown. The only breaks from New York are a harrowing trip to Romania with Plachy and a trip to northern Virginia, where he retreats to a cabin on the grounds of the birthplace of an unnamed Confederate gen eral, presumably Robert E. Lee, where a small memorial to the slaves who kept the plantation running reminds him of the friends he has lost to AIDS. No one to my knowledge has ever explained how the New York of the ’60s became the New York of the ’70s. This book makes you think about a lot of things like that. How the icon of the city went from Allen Ginsberg reading poems at St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery to Halston designing dresses in Olympic Tower before going to Studio 54 with Bianca Jagger is a mys tery. Although Do Something is not analytical or particularly re flective—preferring, I think, to tell the story and let the reader draw their own conclusions—Trebay does capture in wonderful prose the essential things about the sexual playground that Man hattan was during the transition from Doom to Glitter—the emptiness and the danger. He writes: What is too little remarked on is how somnolent and dreamlike the city could be, how in many ways magical appeared this wrecked and depopulated metropolis, my classroom. Great swaths of the city were desolate. The triangle between Canal Street and the World Trade Center (not yet formalized as “Tribeca”) was so hushed at night as to feel like the abandoned back end of some small town, a place where you could ride a bike down the middle of Hudson Street after dark. Everywhere you ventured were forgotten corners, hidden places; shoreline verges dense with reeds and cattails, abandoned piers; smutty aprons of beach lapped by an even dirtier Hudson; dead-end al leys; parks overgrown with sumac, ailanthus, and other op portunistic weed trees; labyrinthine railway tunnels that were the habitats of feral cats and bands of vagrants who, entering through a secret gate in an overpass off the West Side Highway, descended to honeycombed warrens of concrete niches fur nished with castoffs and lighted by candles. “A Neronian scene” he calls it. Paradise for a young man flee ing family sorrow and wondering how he is to fit in and pros per in life! His sex life, however, is not mentioned. Although he loses his virginity to a girl when still in high school, his life when he gets to New York City becomes, if not gay, then gay-adjacent.

Guy Trebay at Todd Snyder Fashion Week, 2018. Andrew Werner photo.

MacDonald and Kalani Durdan and Robert Yoh who would define masculine beauty for a generation. There was the Calvin Klein coterie of newly wealthy and empowered gay profes sionals with lives that centered around meat-rack weekends at Fire Island Pines. There was a network of art types linked through the matrix of one brooding, truculent and irresistible artist—that is, the photographer Peter Hujar. There were the cult deejays who had only recently begun to transform a hobby into a profession, hauling milk crates of vinyl from one ob scure club to another, camp followers trailing behind. Other things that may seem crucial to the reader are not gone into. It’s hard to say what sort of memoir devotes several pages to how Trebay came up with a penname for the writer Jamaica Kincaid but none to the swindling of Trebay’s father, which would seem to be far more dramatic. Sometimes the principle of selection makes the story hard to follow. There is anger in this

TheG & LR

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