
Photo by Anna Moneymaker - Getty Images
Village People and Donald Trump
President-Elect Donald Trump greets the Village People on stage at rally
With the presidential inauguration the new regime will launch what will surely be the greatest upheaval of our government since its founding two and a half centuries ago. The inauguration itself presages one particular down-is-up change for the LGBTQ community.
To fans’ surprise and dismay, the iconic and (formerly) very gay band, The Village People, performed their most recognized (not) gay hit, “Y.M.C.A.” at multiple inauguration events. Ostensibly, the inspiration for the widely mocked Trump dance, the song has long been celebrated as a gay anthem. Apparently, it is not.
In a 2017 interview, Victor Willis, the last of the band’s original members, clarified the song’s not gay origins. According to Willis (who is not gay), who co-wrote the song’s lyrics with Jacques Morali (who is gay). It’s about hanging out with the boys during his childhood in urban neighborhoods and playing basketball at the Y. According to Willis, the lyric “It’s fun to stay at the YMCA” and “You can do whatever you feel” refers to the “fun” of basketball and gambling, and not the euphemistic “fun” as in, you know, the gay carnal kind. But, he added, “I’m happy the gay community adopted it as their anthem. I have no qualms with that.”
Cruisin’ to the Music
Ironically, released in 1978, barely a decade after the Stonewall Uprising, the song quickly became what some have mistakenly described as a gay anthem. It is actually on the third VP album, Cruisin’ (released in Europe as Y.M.C.A.), itself a collection of seemingly gay themed songs. The VP band itself was conceived two years prior to the song’s release by Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, a pair of French music producers who wanted to create a men’s singing group using the traditional all-American gay male iconography of the era: cowboy, Indian, cop, soldier, leather guy and construction worker.
Then the song became a Republican rally theme. That lead to a lawsuit. In a 2023 interview with Piers Morgan on Talk TV, Willis explained why he was suing the Trump campaign over the use of “Y.M.C.A.” “As far as Donald Trump is concerned, I like the fact that he likes my music. I asked him a long time ago not to play the music but at the same time he has a right to use it.” The complaint, however, came in response to fans’ reaction when a tribute band in VP costumes performed at Mar-a-Largo creating a perceived endorsement of Trump by the Village People. Willis’ wife, who is a lawyer, led the suit.
In a more recent statement concerning “Y.M.C.A.” Willis insisted “there’s nothing gay about it” and for those who think there is, he demanded they “get their minds out of the gutter.” Now, the First Amendment notwithstanding, Willis’ wife has threatened to sue anyone who refers to the song as a gay anthem.
Along for the Ride
Nearly half a century ago, I met the Village People and got to know Randy Jones (the cowboy), particularly. It is a long story, of course, but suffice it to say, I was along for the ride when in 1978 the Village People performed YMCA on “Musikladen” (“Music Shop”), a TV pop music show out of Bremen, Germany. I have a couple of memories of that occasion that I will never forget. One is the Village People’s insistence they be photographed with Bremen’s famous “Bremer Musicians” sculpture and their disappointment that the iconic bronze statue was not as big as they expected (a perennial plague, I suppose). The other happened while taking a taxi from the studio to the hotel when David Hodo (who played the construction worker) finally got to open some fan mail he had received. The sender of one particular letter was a closeted young boy (from where I no longer recall) who wrote, “Are you gay? I hope you are …” and went on to say how inspiring it was to watch TV and see someone who was like him. At the time, there was a bit of laugh when Hodo read the letter aloud. The boys in the band (except Willis) were pretty gay, after all.
Jones left the band in 1981. Interviewed a decade ago in 2014, he noted the band had since reached 122,000,000 records sold. He also recognized the lasting impact made by the Village People, not only on pop culture but also on the national psyche. He waxed on about dozens of VP performances on prime-time TV, entering the lives of American families with an “irresistible” song, seeing the “sharpest scalpel in the drawer” making clean incisions and planting a seed “making the audience think differently about people who were different from them.”
Today, the Republican fixation on toxic masculinity and its obsessive homophobia are about to usher in a Lavender Scare 2.0. For the Village People, shedding the band’s gay identity is a practical kowtow. It is a matter of money, of course. From Willis’ perspective, the gay anthem connotation hurts the brand. The song is totally not gay and never was. Propelled by right wing straights, “Y.M.C.A.” has again, after nearly 50 years, returned to the Billboard chart, hitting the number one spot in November of last year.
Still, like it or not, the impact the Village People have made over the decades is irreversible.
Reacting to the irony of Willis’ flip-flop, Newsweek pointed out that he is only one of the original Village People, the Village Idiot.