Victor Willis of Village People, the group behind Donald Trump’s favorite campaign song, “Y.M.C.A.,” disagrees with Trump’s assertion that the song is “the gay national anthem.”
Trump made the comments in March 2022 on the Full Send podcast. “You know what gets ’em rocking? ‘Y.M.C.A.,’ the gay national anthem,” he said at the time. “Did you ever hear that? They call it the gay national anthem. But ‘Y.M.C.A.’ gets people up, and it gets ’em moving.”
Willis used his Facebook page to address the longstanding assumption about the song. “There’s been a lot of talk, especially of late, that ‘Y.M.C.A.’ is somehow a gay anthem,” he wrote in a Monday post. “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.”
The manager of the iconic disco group (and Willis’ wife) Karen Willis recently spoke to The Daily Beast about the group’s new support for the president-elect’s use of the song, after originally declining to perform at his first inauguration or appear at Mar-a-Lago. Victor Willis had even asked that Trump stop using the song—but now the group’s stance is that Trump should keep it up, since he’s “having a lot of fun with it.” The usage has brought the group “several million dollars,” Willis revealed in his post.
“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,” he added on Monday. Karen Willis told the Daily Beast they’d “seriously consider” performing at Trump’s inauguration in January, since “this time is a little different,” because “It’s [Trump’s] anthem.
But first, Victor Willis wanted to set the record straight, so to speak.
“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?’” he added in his post. “This was done in a manner to attempt to shame the president-elect’s use of the song.”
To combat this “defamatory and damaging” characterization, he added, “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, [as] a gay anthem, because such notion is based solely on the song’s lyrics alluding to elicit activity, for which it does not.”
Willis added, “However, I don’t mind that gays think of the song as their anthem.”
