Do Something: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of ’70s New York

A young man leaves his fraying suburban family to find a new one among New York City’s gay demimonde in this fascinating memoir from New York Times style reporter Trebay (In the Place to Be). Trebay opens the narrative with an account of his family’s disintegration in the 1960s and ’70s under a variety of pressures, including his parents’ marital problems, which the children responded to by developing a taste for drugs and petty theft. It all fell apart in 1975, when Trebay’s mother died of cancer and the family house on Long Island burned down due to an electrical fire. The 22-year-old author fled to Manhattan, where he fell in among the city’s rebels and outcasts, including queer Downtown figures Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and drag queen Dorian Corey. Trebay chronicles his salad days busing tables and posing for illustrators before he found his place as an editor at the Village Voice (“If you ever change a comma of mine again, I’ll throw you out the window,” one writer raged after Trebay’s edits). The rambling anecdotes don’t always move the narrative forward, but they coalesce into a rich portrait of the city and its characters. The result is an engrossing story of family dysfunction redeemed by self-reinvention. Photos. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (July)