How YMCA by the Village People became Trump’s theme song

The US President-elect chose the band, whose singer denies that the hit is a gay anthem, to play at his inauguration next week.

The disco anthem about a hostel and gymnasium in 1970s Manhattan popular with gay men had somehow become his theme song.

When Donald Trump bid adieu to Washington four years ago, he told a smattering of supporters to “have a good life, we will see you soon” and stepped from a stage to the blazing horns of YMCA and the voice of Victor Willis of the Village People singing: “Young man! There’s no need to feel down!”

The disco anthem about a hostel and gymnasium in 1970s Manhattan popular with gay men had somehow become his theme song.

Now Trump is coming back, and he is bringing the Village People with him.

The band, to the dismay of some fans, have accepted an invitation to “participate in inaugural activities”.

A group of men dressed variously as a cop, a biker, a Native American, a cowboy and a construction worker will appear alongside the new president in his moment of triumph.

It was a prospect that startled at least one former resident of the McBurney YMCA, the establishment that inspired the song. “I’ve always thought of it as a gay anthem, personally,” said Davidson Garrett who became a tenant there in 1978, the year YMCA was released.

The music video featured the Village People dancing in the street outside.

“They had a construction worker, a guy in motorcycle leathers – these were the kind of costumes that a lot of gay men wore to gay bars back in the Seventies,” Garrett said. “That was why it was comical that Donald Trump would embrace it. He’s not particularly a friend of the LGBTQ community.”

The McBurney YMCA opened in 1904, providing cheap accommodation for single men, merchant seamen, and young artists and actors trying to make their way in the city. Tennessee Williams and Andy Warhol are both said to have stayed for a while.

“It was $40 a week,” said Garrett, 72, who had come to New York from Louisiana, hoping to make it as an actor. The rooms had a bed, a desk, a cupboard for your clothes and a large shared bathroom down the hall. “You got maid service, you got the use of a gymnasium and it was in the middle of Manhattan, right on a subway line.”

About 50 or 60 men, gay and straight, were full-time residents, he said. Then about 250 men would stay there at the weekends and “use it as a crash pad”, he said.

“A lot of gay men that would come there were going to bars and discotheques at the weekends till five o’clock in the morning. Those men were definitely aware of the song.”

The gymnasium stretched across half a dozen floors, with a pool, weights rooms, a jogging track and a basketball court.

“The song in my opinion is more about the gymnasium culture,” said Garrett. “There was probably more cruising the gymnasium part of the gym than the residential part, but there were also a lot of straight men there too.”

Randy Jones, the “cowboy” of the Village People, has said he joined the gymnasium there when he moved to New York in 1975.

Two years later he answered an advertisement placed by Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali, two Frenchmen behind a company called Can’t Stop Productions that was seeking “macho types for world-famous disco group”. Successful applicants “must dance and have a moustache”, it said. Jones was hired.

“I took Jacques [to the McBurney YMCA] three or four times in 1977 and he loved it,” he told the Spin music magazine, which published an oral history of the song in 2008.

“He was fascinated by a place where a person could work out with weights, play basketball, swim, take classes, and get a room. Plus, with Jacques being gay, I had a lot of friends I worked out with who were in the adult film industry, and he was impressed by meeting people he had seen in the videos and magazines. Those visits with me planted a seed in him, and that’s how he got the idea for YMCA.”

Morali was said to have written the melody and the chorus and asked Willis, who is straight, to write the lyrics.

“It was not intended as a gay anthem,” Jones said.

Horace Ott, who arranged the strings and horn sections, told the magazine that he was not sure if it was “a gay song ... it certainly appealed to a lot of people who embraced that lifestyle”.

Willis, who established, via a court judgment in 2015, that he was entitled to a 50 per cent share of the copyright of YMCA, has insisted that the song is not a gay anthem.

“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,” he said.

People falsely assumed that YMCA “must be a message to gay people ... it is not”, he wrote in a Facebook post in December, threatening to sue anyone who said otherwise.

“I knew nothing about the Y being a hangout for gays,” he said. Instead, he had been thinking “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.”

Willis feels that after Trump adopted YMCA as a theme tune for his campaign, “efforts to brand the song as a gay anthem reached a fever pitch” in an effort to shame him.

Trump’s first flirtation with YMCA appears to have come in 2018, during a rally in Mississippi.

“Now we’re replacing the horrible job-killing Nafta [North American Free Trade Agreement] with a brand new US Mexico Canada agreement which is a really good deal for us,” he said. “The USMCA! Like YMCA, the song YMCA.” Then he sang the chorus. “Y-M-C-A!” Anyone struggling to remember the trade deal should think of the song, he said. “We love that song.”

The song was played at his rallies the following year, among a medley of disco and rock anthems. In the first months of the pandemic, in 2020, it was played at a MAGA protest in Michigan against orders from the state’s Democrat governor, Gretchen Whitmer, that citizens remain in their homes. Trump began playing it when he walked off stage.

In June of 2020, when Trump threatened to deploy the military against Black Lives Matter protesters, Willis asked Trump to stop using his music, “especially YMCA and Macho Man”, saying he could “no longer look the other way”.

But though he could have blocked the Trump campaign from using it, “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,” Willis said last month. “I said to my wife one day, hey, Trump seems to genuinely like YMCA and he’s having a lot of fun with it.”

Late in the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign released a compilation of him dancing to YMCA at rallies, making a motion with his fists as if they were grasping an enormous steering wheel. Pink News reported that it showed Trump grooving to “a song that’s definitely, definitely not about gay sex”.

Caryn Neumann, a professor at Miami University of Ohio who wrote an entry for YMCA in a “LGBTQ encyclopaedia”, was also sceptical of the idea that the song was just a celebration of men getting together to play basketball.

“I know that Willis says it’s not a gay song but it’s totally a gay song,” she said. “The lyrics are full of double entendres. ‘You can do whatever you feel’, ‘I’m sure you will find/ Many ways to have a good time’, and the Village People themselves – every single one of them is dressed as a stereotypical gay character.”

But she also acknowledged that the song steadily became a staple soundtrack at baseball and hockey games: a trend that appears to have been started by the ground crew of the New York Yankees in 1996, who began cleaning the field to the song in the fifth inning.

Trump’s incessant use of it during his campaign last year boosted the song to the top of the charts. Willis declared after the Republican National Convention that he wished Trump would stop using it. But last month he acknowledged that Trump had almost certainly helped lift it to No.1 on the Billboard charts.

Some greeted his announcement that the Village People would play at inauguration events with dismay.

“Your music has been a symbol of empowerment and liberation for so many of us,” wrote one. “Yet now you are aligning yourself with an administration that has openly expressed homophobic views.”

Garrett did not approve either.

“I’m sorry that they are lowering themselves,” he said.

He lived at the YMCA until 2000, when he and some of the tenants were moved to another building run by an affordable housing organisation. The YMCA opened a new gym, nine blocks to the south. The old one, like so many other things in the city, was turned into flats.

-The Times