During the 2016, 2020 and 2024 US presidential election campaigns, the list of musicians who voiced their opposition to their songs being used by was long, ranging from , and — at some point — the Village People.
In June 2020, the band’s frontman, Victor Willis, publically objected to the Trump campaign’s use of Village People songs at his rallies. Criticising Trump’s threat to use military force against protesters, Willis then wrote on Facebook, “Sorry, but I can no longer look the other way.”
Money talks
But Willis later had a change of tune, noticing that “Y.M.C.A.” was enjoying renewed success during the 2024 campaign: As Trump kept using the iconic hit at his rallies, the 46-year-old track spent several weeks at the top of Billboard’s hottest-selling dance songs chart.
“The financial benefits have been great as well, as ‘Y.M.C.A.’ is estimated to gross several million dollars since the President-elect’s continued use of the song,” Willis acknowledged in a Facebook post in December 2024.
So now, the Village People are ready to look the other way, accepting an invitation from the president-elect’s team to perform at , including at least one attended by Trump himself.
“We know this won’t make some of you happy to hear, however we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics,” the band wrote in a statement posted on their official Facebook page as they announced their participation. “Our song ‘Y.M.C.A.’ is a global anthem that hopefully helps bring the country together after a tumultuous and divided campaign where our preferred candidate lost. Therefore, we believe it’s now time to bring the country together with music.”
The announcement on Village People’s and Willis’ official Facebook pages sparked thousands of comments. While Trump supporters praised the decision, many were shocked, pointing out that the disco group originally started out as an icon of the gay community in the 1970s and that Trump’s MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement is openly homophobic and opposed to same-sex marriage.
“You can’t put politics aside when it’s those same politics that will strip the LGBTQ, women and others of their rights. You’re not singing at a celebration but a funeral of American values,” wrote Aundaray Guess, executive director at GRIOT Circle, a New York non-profit organization dedicated to eliminating all forms of oppression against minorities.
From gay icon to mainstream
Village People was created in 1977 by Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, French music producers who wanted to land hits in the US.
Though only Morali was openly gay, it was by attending gay disco parties in Greenwich Village that they came up with the concept of putting together a group of singers and dancers who would wear costumes embodying different gay fantasy figures: a cop, a Native American chief, a cowboy, a construction worker, a leather-clad biker and a sailor.
Village People was therefore a manufactured boy band like many others, but it was specifically designed to target the queer community, developed during a decade of crucial queer liberation and political activism that was also closely tied to disco culture.
Morali was “committed to ending the cultural invisibility of gay men,” writes music historian Alice Echols in her book “Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture” (2010), quoting an interview the French music producer gave to Rolling Stone magazine in 1978: “I think to myself that gay people have no group,” Morali said after outing himself as gay, “nobody to personalize the gay people, you know?”
While the group did play a key role in making gay culture visible, straight people didn’t necessarily interpret the performers’ style as gay macho drag, as Echols also notes in her book.
Village People’s songs, which play on special male bonds in military regiments (“In the Navy”) or at the Young Men’s Christian Association’s hostels (“Y.M.C.A.”), were quickly adopted by the mainstream.
Indeed, from toddlers to senior citizens, anyone can have wholesome fun spelling out the letters Y M C A using arm movements to the hit song, without thinking about any possible double entendres related to the ways a young man can have fun staying at a Y.M.C.A.
The Village People thereby contributed to presenting “urban gay macho identities as banal media products,” concludes Echols.
‘I gotta be a macho man’
Warming up his crowds with Village People’s “Macho Man” at his rallies, Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda resonates with men who see feminism and the LGBTQ+ rights movements as threats, and who are trying to redefine their role through hypermasculinity — by embodying the hyperbolic macho man.
When analyzing how Donald Trump and the Village People fit unexpectedly well together, many authors refer to American critic Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’.” As she explained in the essay, camp is a concept that is very difficult to define; it’s rather something that can be recognized when you see it, that triggers the reaction “it’s good because it’s awful.”
Camp “neutralizes moral indignation” through playfulness, Sontag argued. The LGBTQ+ community readily adopted camp as a protective aesthetic to promote their lifestyle and values, but as Sontag already noted in 1964, camp is not gender or sexuality specific.
Similarly, Trump plays on camp, with his derisive bluster protecting him from blowback — no one knows exactly when he’s joking or not. As Dan Brooks points out in a New York Times Magazine piece, a “miasma of ill-defined but ever-present irony makes Trump virtually impossible to mock.”
Disco feuds
As the band’s lead singer, Willis co-wrote with Morali some of the band’s best-known hits, including “Macho Man,” “Y.M.C.A,” “In the Navy,” and “Go West.” However, he left the Village People in 1979, in the hope of going solo.
In the 2010s, Willis went through years of legal battles and obtained 50% of the copyright to many of the group’s songs.
Following the court settlement that found him to be the only surviving owner of the songs’ rights (Morali died of AIDS-related complications in 1991), Willis rejoined the group and replaced all members. He now owns the band and is actively working on rebranding his songs.
He threatens to sue any media outlet that characterizes “Y.M.C.A.” as a gay anthem.
For him, it was never intended as a political or cultural statement: “When I say ‘hang out with all the boys,’ that was simply 1970s Black slang for Black guys hanging out together for sports, gambling or whatever,” Willis wrote on Facebook in December 2024. “There’s nothing gay about that.”
Edited by: Cristina Burack
The post ‘Nothing gay about it’: What connects Donald Trump and the Village People appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
