Guy Trebay’s new book captures more than just the flair of New York in the 1970s

A recognized voice on fashion, culture, art and style, Guy Trebay’s insightful articles often provoke further questions or conversation. But this summer, he upped the ante and turned the spotlight on his life with the release of Do Something: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of ’70s New York.

In the book, published by Penguin Random House, the longtime New York Times reporter describes his childhood on Long Island, the rise and fall of his father, the founder of Hawaiian Surf, his charming but unhinged mother, a sister’s arrest for armed robbery and more. By his own account, Trebay barely managed to finish high school without bothering to get his diploma. In 1975, an ice storm sparked an electrical fire that set his family’s home ablaze. “Whatever the fire spared was (allegedly) taken away by firefighters…”

Through his descriptive lines, Trebay transports readers to his childhood on the beach, his short-lived school days, his unpredictable family life, his thrift shopping at Bogie’s on East Tenth Street, his $40-a-night job on the Tenth Floor (despite being “obviously a nobody”), his money-courier service for a Lebanese bank, and other rougher days as he made his way in New York City, meeting creatives like Andy Warhol, Charles James, Candy Darling, Horst P. Horst, and Valentine Crawford (better known as “Nicholas”). Trebay explains in his tome how he was drawn to people like Darling because he shared their “desire to transform, without knowing exactly what.”

In an interview last month, Trebay said, “There was definitely a moment where I thought, ‘I just took off my clothes and I’m walking across Times Square. What am I doing? It’s your life.’ I’m not so sure you’d do something like that again if you thought about it beforehand.”

His words revealed that James’ “home uniform was an oversized white Brooks Brothers Oxford shirt, with the collar turned up and the waist cinched in with a wide leather belt, and chunky platform shoes from Candie, size 12”^th Street discounters and jockey briefs. Charles was always vain about his legs,” writes Trebay.

When Trebay wanted to photograph his younger sister Dana in what was then “the most famous work in James’ archives,” the designer agreed to loan him his 1937 quilted satin evening jacket. But that decision put their friendship on hold after James learned that his loaned piece had been walked on the West Side Highway.

“Do Something” is not a reading of the heyday, but offers excerpts from the hardships, challenges and rewards of a once stubborn but now purposeful life. In the interview, Trebay said: “My goal with the book was for it to have a strong, emotional charge.”

The award-winning columnist said: “I’m now aware of all the tricks authors use to try to influence their readers. I respect that we all have customers and that readers should be entertained. But it’s the emotional resonance of a book (that stays with you). A friend told me in the beginning, ‘If the book succeeds at all, no one will read your story. They will read themselves into your story.'”

Trebay decided to write something for himself after the sudden death of his younger sister in 2012. Six years later, he used some of that source material to write a chapter that his agent pitched and sold. Never taking a break from his job at The New York Times, Trebay wrote the book on weekends and vacations. Despite his decades-long career, there was a learning curve. “I miscalculated at the beginning because I thought, ‘I’ve got this. I’m a writer. I know how to do this,'” he said. “But I had to learn a whole new set of skills that I didn’t expect.”

From his perspective, the memoir is not so much about him as it is about describing worlds. “In journalism, we generally operate in real time. The skills required to travel back and forth in time, which is kind of how consciousness works – at least it works for me, I think for most of us – were not so easy to put on paper at first,” Trebay said. “And of course, processing things about your family and your past is going to be challenging. I knew from the beginning that part was going to happen.”

After starting in 2019, he completed the page-turner last year. “If nothing else, I’ve always had an iron work ethic. That was necessary because I’ve been on my own since I was 17. The only thing I understand is work…” he said. “I love my job and I never want to feel like I’m stealing from my job to do this.”

“For a number of reasons, one of which was the real estate market,” New York City in the 1970s was “overpopulated with creative people who found a place or a place to go,” he said. Trebay started out as a painter and said that during the question-and-answer sessions – which were novel at the time – at the Factory, he realized he wanted to be a writer, which had never been his life goal until then. “I wanted to write stories. I realized that pretty quickly.”

There, he was one of the first to hear Warhol’s prediction of 15 minutes of fame – albeit secondhand from Rosemary Kent, who made the remark as she returned from lunch with Warhol, Trebay said.

“(Author) Judith Thurman called it a ‘free haven for creative minds.’ It was, without a doubt. And I don’t know if it can ever be that again,” Trebay said. “So people started moving first to the outskirts and then to LA, Berlin and other cities where there was affordable space to create their creative lives. What I don’t understand as much is how we culturally managed to more or less forget the memory of the AIDS pandemic,” Trebay said. “It’s a kind of cultural forgetting. I think there’s a deliberate part of it.”

One sign of how the book attempts to reverse that viewpoint is the portrait on the cover, taken in Trebay’s Bronx apartment (which cost $78 a month at the time) by Scott Heiser, a largely unknown photographer who died in 1993. “The choice was made to remind us that he, among many other people, actually existed and created these works,” he said.

From the beginning, it was always important that the book be a kind of testimony. “Very, very many of the things we benefit from today come from these people who had these very short lives,” said Trebay, who has written about the evolution of masculinity. “Some of the objects that are included today also go back to the politics of those years. There was a base, an origin, and there were these renegades who lived very gendered lives. They weren’t really formalized yet, because gender studies didn’t happen in academia on a large scale until the ’90s, which was the beginning of the formalization of these things. I don’t know if you can draw a line there. Plus, Google has destroyed memory.”

To all the cynics who question the glory days of long-lost New York City, Trebay said, “One thing I can say is that I’m not nostalgic – not nostalgic at all. It’s more of a repertoire – this is what really happened. The book is very open-ended. Nobody had a five-year plan or a five-minute plan. It was magical in a way that I didn’t really know at the time. My job in doing this was to conjure up the magic, not to say that this was the only magic that ever happened.”

To acquire the technical skills he needed to write the book, he read widely, especially memoirists such as André Josselin and Gabrielle Hamilton. Trebay acknowledged that many people like to say they can’t look at other people’s writing when they’re working, saying, “I do that, but not because I want to imitate. I always think of it like a carpenter. If you don’t know how to do a dovetail joint, you look at how someone else made that drawer.”

The author, an introvert who has become an extrovert, said of his reading tour: “I’m not an artist by nature, but I’ll try. I like to talk.”

And once all the hustle and bustle has died down, Trebay might be able to take a break: “It will be really, really nice to have a real weekend,” he says.