Jim Newman was over it. “Hell no!” Newman, a Village People member for eight years in the 2010s, wrote in a 15 January Instagram post. “Neither myself or any of my band mates will be performing at Trump’s rallies.” Newman had received a slew of texts asking if he would be on stage with the president in the leadup to the inauguration, and he wanted to set the record straight. “Our Village People would never ever perform at a Trump rally; we would never give him the rights to use those songs.”
Donald Trump has been slowly adopting the song as a campaign anthem since 2018, playing it at rallies and dancing on stage to it. It became a favorite at anti-lockdown rallies, DJ Steve Bannon has spun it and Trump helped it hit No 1 decades after its release on Billboard’s dance/electronic sales chart. It all peaked with a performance of the song by a group calling themselves Village People but containing only one original member, the “cop” Victor Willis, at the inauguration ball. The song was co-written in 1978 by Willis and the French songwriting/production duo Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo.
Willis’s performances as Village People at inauguration events come after a two-decade crusade to secure usage of the group’s name and the royalties he says he was denied.
Right now, there are two iterations of Village People – the Willis outfit playing for Trump, and Kings of Disco, a touring outfit made up of Newman alongside the original member Alex Briley (GI), Ray Simpson (who replaced Willis as the “cop” in 1980), Eric Anzalone (the “biker” from 1995 after the original member Glenn Hughes hung up his leathers), Bill Whitefield (the “construction worker” from 2013, replacing David Hodo), and Andrew Pacho (the “Native American” character since 2013).
When contacted by the Guardian, former members declined to speak on the record for fear of Willis, whom one described as “extremely litigious”.
Young man! Are you listening to me?
Depending on how you look at it, it’s depressingly ironic or strangely apt that Village People are the latest puppets in Trump’s theatre of absurdity. As the new president sets in motion executive orders that threaten LGBTQ+ rights, he finds fellow cartoonish figures in the six-piece that happen to share his love of a well-crafted stage persona. (When asked recently if the president could stand to learn anything from drag, the performer Bianca Del Rio spluttered: “He’s already wearing makeup, wig and heels.”) At the pre-inauguration event, the six-piece flanked the politician on stage for YMCA while he did his little fist-bumping dance, a move apparently known as the “double jerk”.
A few weeks before the inauguration, Willis – who, reminder, makes his living by dressing up as a cop – said in a statement on Facebook that the song “is not really a gay anthem”. “When I say [in the song], ‘hang out with all the boys’ that is simply 1970s Black slang for Black guys hanging out together for sports, gambling or whatever. There’s nothing gay about that.” He also threatened to sue any news organization that pegged the song as a gay anthem.
Village People’s repertoire includes Macho Man, a song that drools over bulging muscles and In the Navy, an anthem about searching for seamen.
“The lady doth protest too much,” says Brian Wenke, the executive director of the LGBTQ+ non-profit It Gets Better. “You can’t deny that YMCA is a gay anthem. You can try to gaslight it into thinking that this was not a memorable song from 1980s gay nightlife, but it is what it is.”
Trump’s taste skews towards brash 80s – this is a guy who invited Hulk Hogan to the RNC and just named Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sly Stallone Hollywood ambassadors – so his penchant for the YMCA is unsurprising. The president’s use of the song dates back to his 2018 remarks while introducing a new US-Mexico-Canada trade deal. “The USMCA! Like the song YMCA,” he explained, before singing the song’s chorus. As Trump began to walk out to the song at rallies, Willis – who had won co-ownership of the band’s early music as well as the group’s name in 2010s court cases – initially asked him to refrain from using Village People music, followed by a 2023 cease-and-desist. After Trump won a second term, Willis changed his mind and said in a Fox News interview that he’d given the Trump campaign rights to use the tune. He added on Facebook: “The financial benefits have been great.”
The millions that Willis says he stands to make from a Maga-endorsed YMCA presumably makes it easier for him and his associates to put on all the bells and whistles (well, fringe and leather) for an administration set on a scorched-earth approach to LGBTQ+ protections. On his first day in office, Trump signed executive orders to lay off all government diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) staff and declared there are only “two genders”.
Wenke says that Trump’s showboating is a way to deflect and distract from the issues at hand. “We can be disappointed that the Village People lost their mind,” he says. “But we have to pick our battles and recognize what is just thrown out there to inflame us and get us upset, and focus on the issues that are going to have a directly negative impact on our community.”
No man does it all by himself
The Village People sound can be traced back to the 1970s gay clubs of Manhattan, like the Loft, the Gallery and Paradise Garage, where DJs like David Mancuso, Larry Levan and Francis Grasso were experimenting with a sound that fused 4/4 beats with swirling orchestral sounds.
Grasso, who was heterosexual, said that gay clubbers embraced new sounds – as he put it, “things that the straights couldn’t have handled.” As disco fever swept the nation, the idea for Village People came from two French musicians: the songwriter Jacques Morali, who was gay, and the producer Henri Belolo, who was straight (and whose son Willis says attended the inauguration). While bar hopping in New York’s West Village, they hit on the idea for a boyband based on gay fantasy characters.
“We saw a [Native American] walking down the street and we heard the bells he was carrying on his feet,” Belolo, who died in 2019, said in an interview. They followed the man into the infamous BDSM sex club the Anvil, where they saw him get cruised by a dude in cowboy drag. “We said ‘My God, look at those characters.’ So we started to fantasize on what were the characters of America. The mix of the American man.” About 60 people showed up for Belolo and Morali’s casting after the pair placed an ad in the Village Voice reading: “Macho types wanted. Must have mustache.”
Village People offered a family-friendly version of the smutty gay disco that had been percolating in the clubs and which could be shamelessly lewd (the art of Rod McKuen’s 1977 album Slide … Easy In, showed a hairy arm grabbing a fistful of lube from a shortening can labeled “Disco”). Others in the scene “were pushing sex”, writes the author Martin Aston in Breaking Down The Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out. “[But] Morali was positioning the Village People as a light-hearted novelty act with cartoon innuendo.”
After a couple of minor hits, Village People went stratospheric with YMCA, hitting No 2 in the US and No 1 in15 countries, including the UK. It’s the kind of song that’s hard to hear with fresh ears, but there’s a goofy exuberance to Willis’s delivery, backed with Morali’s joyous horns and swirling strings, that lifts it above the novelty hits of its day.
“I knew we had something special, because it sounded like a commercial,” the original Village Person David Hodo told Spin. “And everyone likes commercials.” He might have been too hard on it. The song was warmly received by the scene’s chronicler Vince Aletti, who called YMCA’s parent album Cruisin’ an “essential release” in his iconic Disco File Column in Record World, noting: “Choruses given the impact of a prize fighter’s combination punch.” And the single plowed its way into mass consciousness after an appearance on American Bandstand, where the audience supposedly created a perfectly-synchronized Y-M-C-A dance while the band performed, and 1980’s Razzie-winning pseudo biopic Can’t Stop the Music.
You can hang out with all the boys
Village People’s double entendres were only there if you knew to pick up on them. “The gay meanings it had in that moment were subcultural, because gay identities were not yet mainstreamed – that happened in the 90s,” says Nadine Hubbs, a women’s and gender Studies and music professor at University of Michigan. What gay viewers clocked as a Leatherman or Castro Clone might have simply read as nice young men to straight viewers watching TV at teatime. “Pretty much all gay meanings had to work on two levels,” Hubbs adds. “Like Cole Porter songs, and so many blues songs that had sexual innuendo, they had to pass in polite society – which was middle-class, heterosexual, and white.”
For 22 months, Village People were the biggest pop group in the country, with Madonna and Michael Jackson opening for them on tour, three top 20 hits, and a Rolling Stone magazine cover. After Willis left the group in 1980, he was replaced by Ray Simpson and, after a hiatus, the six-piece enjoyed a quiet, dependable two decades of performing hits on cruise ships and at corporate events and bar mitzvahs.
In the 90s, YMCA began to take on a new life after the New York Yankees began blasting it in the fifth inning, and the song quickly caught on at ballparks across the country. “All these years later, the gay subtext is gone,” the veteran nightlife reporter Michael Musto said in 2008. “It’s a rah-rah crowd-pleaser for the baseball stadium crowd. It happens. A rallying song for the oppressed turns into a middle-of-the-road spirit-lifter, mainly because the straights like to steal things from the gays, take away all the scary edge, and make it their own.”
Hubbs notes that Trump’s continuing use of the song could start to cloud our understanding of the YMCA as an exuberant part of post-Stonewall LGBTQ+ life. “Authoritarians rewrite history,” she points out. “It’s an important task for them. They seek to weaken our shared reality and to confuse shared understandings. And this song is in the language of disco, which is a gay genre which came out of gay genius in Black and Latine clubs and later became mainstream. So whatever Trump might do with the song, whatever evangelical supporters of Trump might make of the song, this is a part of gay history.”
That’s true whether or not Willis and his current People feel loyalty to the LGBTQ+ roots of YMCA. For all the fanfare and Willis’s Facebook screeds about it, Village People’s closing performance at the Liberty Inaugural Ball offered little to write home about. As the familiar horns started up and synths began to swirl, you could hardly make out the group as Trump and his cronies flooded the stage, blocking the view of the band from the telecast. The YMCA that night was plagued with sound issues, as the backing track cut out, leaving only Willis’ unstable, wheezing singing voice. Behind them, an LED vortex swirled in Maga red, white, and blue, as if sucking them in.
