Lead Singer of The Village People Wants You to Know That The YMCA is NOT GAY

VICTOR WILLIS' FULL 967 WORD FACEBOOK POST ON WHY THE YMCA IS NOT GAY:

Village People singer Victor Willis on Facebook: 

"WHY I ALLOWED PRESIDENT ELECT TRUMP’S CONTINUED USE OF Y.M.C.A. AND WHY THE SONG IS NOT REALLY A GAY ANTHEM 

To Village People fans and the media: I am the singer and writer of the lyrics to the hit Y.M.C.A.  In fact, as was adjudicated and ruled in a U.S. District Court, I wrote 100% of the lyrics, and my writing partner, Jacques Morali wrote the music.   

Since 2020, I’ve received over a thousand complaints about President Elect Trump’s use of Y.M.C.A.  With that many complaints, I decided to ask the President Elect to stop using Y.M.C.A. because his use had become a nuisance to me. 

However, the use continued because the Trump campaign knew they had obtained a political use license from BMI and absent that license being terminated, they had every right to continue using Y.M.C.A. And they did. In fact, I started noticing numerous artists withdrawing the President Elect’s use of their material. But by the time I said to my wife one day, hey, “Trump” seems to genuinely like Y.M.C.A. and he’s having a lot of fun with it.   

As such, I simply didn’t have the heart to prevent his continued use of my song in the face of so many artists withdrawing his use of their material. So I told my wife to inform BMI to not withdraw the Trump campaign political use license. My French partners were contemplating legal action out of France. So I had my wife contact our French partners and asked them to stay out of the Trump campaign’s use of Y.M.C.A. because it is a U.S. matter, and I will make the decision on his use. Our French partners quickly backed off of their objection to his use. Y.M.C.A. has benefited greatly from use by the President Elect.  For example, Y.M.C.A. was stuck at #2 on the Billboard chart prior to the President Elect’s use.  However, the song finally made it to #1 on a Billboard chart after over 45 years (and held on to #1 for two weeks) due to the President Elect’s use.   

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. Therefore, I’m glad I allowed the President Elect’s continued use of Y.M.C.A. And I thank him for choosing to use my song.       

There’s been a lot of talk, especially of late, that Y.M.C.A. is somehow a gay anthem. As I’ve said numerous times in the past, that is a false assumption based on the fact that my writing partner was gay, and some (not all) of Village People were gay, and that the first Village People album was totally about gay life. 

This assumption is also based on the fact that the YMCA was apparently being used as some sort of gay hangout and since one of the writers was gay and some of the Village People are gay, the song must be a message to gay people. To that I say once again, get your minds out of the gutter. It is not.

Sadly, when the President Elect started using the song, people attempting to brand the song as a gay anthem reached a fever pitch as many used it to say, oh, Trump don’t know the song is a gay anthem?  This was done in a manner to attempt to shame the President Elect’s use of the song.   As I stated on numerous occasions, I knew nothing about the Y being a hang out for gays when I wrote the lyrics to Y.M.C.A. and Jacques Morali (who was gay) never once stated such to me. In fact, Jacques never once told me how to write my lyrics otherwise I would have said to him, you don’t need me, why don’t you simply write the lyrics.     

I therefore wrote Y.M.C.A. about the things I knew about the Y in the urban areas of San Francisco such as swimming, basketball, track, and cheap food and cheap rooms. And when I say, “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. 

So, to the extent that Y.M.C.A. is considered a gay anthem based on the fact that gays once used certain YMCA’s for elicit activity, the assumption that the song alludes to that is completely misguided. 

Therefore, since I wrote the lyrics and ought to know what the lyrics I wrote is really about, come January 2025, my wife will start suing each and every news organization that falsely refers to Y.M.C.A., either in their headlines or alluded to in the base of the story, that Y.M.C.A. is somehow a gay anthem because such notion is based solely on the song’s lyrics alluding to elicit activity for which it does not. However, I don't mind that gays think of the song as their anthem. But you’d be hard-pressed to find Y.M.C.A. on the play list at any gay club, parade or other gay activity in a way that would suggest it’s somehow an anthem to the community other than alluding to illicit activity, which is defamatory, and damaging to the song. But it stops in 2025.   

However, you know where you-will find Y.M.C.A.? On the play list of almost every wedding, bar mitzvah, sporting organization, and the song is used in commercials and motion pictures and products worldwide.   The true anthem is Y.M.C.A.’s appeal to people of all strips including President Elect Trump. But the song is not really a gay anthem other than certain people falsely suggesting that it is. And this must stop because it is damaging to the song." 

(December 2, 2024)

We're told to stay away from almost everything even slightly political on the blog. Sometimes that annoys me. Especially when I'm struggling to find something to write about, and EVERYTHING in the news is political. Even more especially when the politics-adjacent story I'd like to blog about is hilarious. But in the end it's probably for the best. It's almost completely impossible to make any sort of political joke, no matter what angle you're coming from, or how unserious you are about what you're saying, and not have somebody attempt to read between the lines and make a blanket assumption about everything you stand for as a person.

Recently, I've been called racist for suggesting that Anthony Richardson throwing a pick 6 immediately after getting his starting job back would be kind of hilarious. I had some crypto guy post multiple tweets about me, tagging Dave, because I made a completely nothing joke about pronouns in a blog. I hyperbolically referred to a Big Brother contestant as "the worst human being I've ever seen on TV" (or something like that), and was absolutely flamed by Big Brother Reddit for a full week. I didn't even dive into those comments, but I'm assuming there were quite a few aspersions cast upon me for that one.

Conversely, this past weekend I suggested that Ohio State might be taking Michigan planting a flag on their turf (a surface unplantable for flags) a little too seriously. Apparently that's a lib take. I also remember being called a lib for saying I'd prefer my governor wouldn't fight a toothless meth-addict in Rough n' Rowdy. Whatever. You can tell I'm not worried about it because I spent three paragraphs qualifying myself. 

But please, please, please... can we all please just come together and agree that a member of the Village People drafting a 967-word Facebook post about how his YMCA song is NOT GAY, is objectively funny? 

That's just good stuff right there. The YMCA song, which Donald Trump often (if not always? idfk..) walks out and dances to at his rallies, is unequivocally, 100% NOT GAY. Don't even think about calling it gay either. If you think the song is gay, then you're the gay one. It's a song about having a good, wholesome, straight-ass time with your straight-ass homies. In fact, if somebody calls my song gay one more time, me and my wife are going to sue you. It's damaging the reputation of my top 5 most popular song in the history of the world. I've sat quietly by and let people call my song gay for years. But it stops in 2025. YMCA = NOT GAY.

For one, I feel like this is a pretty terrible strategy if your goal is to stop gay people from referring to your song as a gay anthem. I suppose if he can prevent the mainstream media from referring to his song as gay by way of lawsuit, then that's something. But you sure as hell can't stop the internet. In my experience, when you tell ANYBODY that they're not allowed to refer to "X" as "Y". Then they're going to start referring to "X" as "Y" even harder. That's just how people work. You're only encouraging them to do it further. That's internet 101. Big Cat has been making the same joke based on that very premise for years.

Unfortunately for Victor, if a portion of the gay population want to consider the YMCA gay anthem, then that's what it is to them. You can stop people from monetizing it. It appears you can stop media companies from speaking about it that way (I'm still not sure how that works but Victor says he can sue them). But you can't control what the general public does with it. If someone set a video of themselves sucking 1,000 dicks to Bawitdaba by Kid Rock, and that video goes viral, then all the world's gays decide that Bawitdaba will be their official gay sex song for the rest of eternity. Then Bawitdaba is a gay sex song to them. And if people want to blast Pink Pony Club over a loudspeaker as the INS ushers immigrants back across the border, and turn Chappell Roan's song about safe spaces into their deportation anthem, nobody can stop them from that either

But most importantly, nobody fucking cares if people call the song gay. Nobody is "owning" Donald Trump by quote tweeting a video of him dancing with "HAHA OMG THAT'S A GAY SONG!"

He just had over half of America vote him to be President. His reputation isn't being damaged by gay jokes at this point. It is what it is. The people who think they're owning him with that, and any Trump supporters who actually might get upset and argue back with them, are like .0000000000000000001% of the population, just yelling back and forth at each other in their own little Twitter bubble that nobody else will see.

But fuck... issuing what's basically a press release about how not gay your song is... now you're just validating it. You just let people know it bothers you. That's very funny god damn it. It's so good it almost seems like parody. It's almost too on the nose to even make fun of. Victor legitimately sounds like he's doing a Cum Town bit.

Although in defense of Victor Willis… today is the day I learned that the Village People are not all gay. As a child, I was told the Village People were gay across the board. From flamboyant construction worker to kind of racist Indian. 

Michael Ochs Archives. Getty Images.

I've lived my entire life under that assumption. But Victor Willis has a wife. I have to imagine Victor has spent his entire life with something like 90% of fans and strangers he meets just assuming he's a gay man. I bet he's been propositioned more times than everybody reading this blog combined. As a 73-year old man who is very much straight, I can see how decades and decades of that would wear on you. So maybe that played a role in his 967-word diatribe on the straightness of his life's greatest achievement. 

I wonder if Victor may have seen the writing on the wall? Or at a least thought he did? You know he's been cashing checks like crazy ever since Donald Trump adopted the song. Maybe he started seeing the accusations of "gay" on his timeline. Then he started clicking on the articles to see what they said. Then those types of articles got worked into his algorithm. All the sudden, every other post he sees on whatever social media app he's using is about how gay his song is. Then he started thinking to himself, "Oh shit… what if Trump doesn't like this and stops using my song. I can't afford that. I just closed on a beach house in Key West. I need these fucking checks to keep cashing. I gotta put a stop to this gay shit right away."

That does seem like the thought process of a 73-year old man who doesn't fully understand how the internet works. Or maybe Trump's team legitimately reached out to him and threatened to stop using his song unless he set the record straight (no pun intended). I have no idea at this point. I stopped trying to pretend I have any idea why any politician thinks or does what they do a long time ago.

But good on you, Victor Willis. Your post made me laugh. And now I know that neither you, or your song are gay. I'm glad the YMCA was finally able to come out hetero. That was very brave of it.