We will never forget Donald Trump ‘dancing’ to gay anthem

The billionaire owner of Trump Tower has ended almost every election campaign rally by pumping his fists to the Village People’s YMCA.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump “dances” to YMCA at a campaign rally at the North Carolina in August. (Photo: Peter Zay/AFP.)

President John F. Kennedy was proud of his naval service on PT 109 in the Pacific during World War II. His boat was sliced in two on August 1, 1943, by a Japanese destroyer and Kennedy courageously swam 5km in the dark to reach an island for help.

Weeks before his assassination he wrote: “Any man who may be asked … what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction, ‘I served in the United States Navy’.”

When questioned later about his heroics, he would humbly respond that it “was involuntary. They sank my boat.”

It is hard to imagine JFK on the campaign trail and in naval uniform strutting down the deck, clapping his hands in front of his face and singing: “Where can you find pleasure, search the world for treasure, learn science, technology.”

The answer is, of course, in the navy. And that was the dance routine in the Village People’s video for the song of that name that reached No. 7 on the Australian charts early in 1979.

In the Navy was the follow-up to the band’s No. 1 hit the year before – YMCA.

If we remember anything from this most extraordinary of US election campaigns, it will likely be Donald Trump pumping his fists in the air as campaign organisers blasted out that legendary gay anthem.

He did it again at the Madison Square Garden rally in New York City last week. The Village People, at their peak, sold out that 30,000-seat venue two days running. It is easy to forget how big they were and to dismiss them as a gimmick. Which certainly the band was – but so too the Monkees and Kiss. However, the Village People had a deeper impact: in 2020 YMCA was added to the US Library of Congress National Recording Registry, which preserves for posterity audio that is “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” where it sits alongside songs such as When the Saints Go Marching In, Moon River, White Christmas and Thomas Edison’s 1878 tin foil recording.

The song and the band came about in unusual circumstance. Moroccan-born musicians Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo independently drifted to Paris: Belolo in the late 1950s producing musical acts and promoting concert tours, including by James Brown and later the young Bee Gees; Morali migrated there in the mid-’60s and wrote music for the Crazy Horse nightclub.

They didn’t meet until Belolo moved to New York in 1973 to launch Can’t Stop Productions where he met up with Morali through a mutual friend, Elizabeth Taylor’s hairdresser.

They teamed up to catch the wave of the nascent Philadelphia sound. It was big with brass sections mixed forward and rich orchestral backing of funk and soul songs. Disco would be born when Morali encountered the Ritchie Family – three unrelated female singers – and with Belolo reworked a 1939 song written by a piano-playing soccer broadcaster called Ary Barroso. The song Brazil was well known, particularly the Carmen Miranda version. Morali gave it an epic Cecil B. DeMille treatment across 5½ minutes and the influential single and album of that name charted strongly in 1975, particularly in the US. The album cover featured a stylised painting of Miranda.

Members of band Village People (clockwise from top): Randy Jones, Victor Willis, Alex Briley, Glenn Hughes, Felipe Rose and David Hodo.

Singer and actor Victor Willis sent a tape of some songs to Morali, who thought Willis had the voice on which to build a winning musical idea and hired songwriters to create an album around his image. The Village People album did well, especially the first single San Francisco (You’ve Got Me). Morali then set out to populate the village with real singers; the image was paramount. Morali was a regular at Greenwich Village gay bars and wanted the band members to be like the men he saw there. He placed an ad in the newspaper: “Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance And Have A Moustache.”

By then he had already met Felipe Rose, a nightclub dancer who would sometimes celebrate his part-Indian ancestry by dressing in a feathered headdress. Among those answering the ad were Glenn Hughes (the bikie known as Leatherman), David Hodo (the construction worker) and Randy Jones (the cowboy). Alex Briley (the GI) was hired, while Willis would be the policeman and would write or co-write all the band’s hits.

Things took off quickly with the hurriedly recorded Macho Man album rising in charts worldwide. But it was the following YMCA single from the provocatively titled Cruisin’ that set records. It was issued in three formats, a radio single (3.49), an album version (4.47) and a 12-inch nightclub version (6.47).

The famous film clip was shot outside Greenwich Village’s McBurney branch of the YMCA, which functions today as a Young Men’s Christian Association centre. It is a long way in every sense from the former president’s vainglorious Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. And no doubt his staff wonder how closely Trump has listened to the nudge-nudge wink-wink lyrics?

“They have everything for young men to enjoy

“You can hang out with all the boys.”

The YMCA organisation took the Village People to court for infringing its trademark but soon reached a settlement out of court.

Later, Willis sued and won a case claiming Belolo had not contributed to the lyrics. He and Morali’s estate own the songs 50-50.

Willis first left the band in 1980 and it never had another hit. Morali contracted HIV in the mid-’80s and died, aged 44, of AIDS-related causes in 1991 in Paris. Belolo died aged 82 also in Paris in 2019.

Willis struggled with drug addiction for many years but came clean after a stint at the Betty Ford Clinic. He had toured Australia in 1976 as part of the Broadway production of The Wiz.

The Village People reformed briefly in 1982 and again in 1991 to perform before the rugby league grand final in Sydney. They have reunited and performed irregularly since and release a song each year or so and last year a Christmas album. They have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Ironically, Willis these days remains the only original member.

Hughes took seriously his role as Leatherman and each day rode his motorcycle around Greenwich Village in his Village People clobber. On every block people would wave or shout out “Leatherman!”

He’d been a toll collector on the Brooklyn tunnel when he saw the ad for moustachioed men. A lifetime smoker, he died of lung cancer aged 50 and is buried in a Long Island cemetery not far from tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis, who won the 1977 Australian Open.

Of course, Hughes was interred in his full Leatherman finery.