Victor Willis, The Village People co-founder and singer, issued a lengthy statement on Facebook Sunday, explaining he’s fine with President-elect Donald Trump playing the song “Y.M.C.A.” at his rallies and pushing back against mainstream media labeling the hit tune a “gay anthem.”
The message began, “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.”
Willis continued, saying he told his wife one day that “Trump seems to genuinely like Y.M.C.A. and he’s having a lot of fun with it,” explaining he “didn’t have the heart to prevent his [Trump’s] continued use” of the song.
The singer asked BMI and his business partners in France to withhold from withdrawing the Trump campaign’s political use license for “Y.M.C.A.”
“Y.M.C.A. has benefited greatly from use by the President Elect,” Willis pointed out. “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.”
Trump’s use of the song has generated several million dollars for Willis, who thanked the president-elect and said he’s “glad” he allowed him to continue playing the song.
Continuing, Willis pushed back against media outlets labeling the track a “gay anthem.”
“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,” he wrote.
“Get your minds out of the gutter,” Willis told individuals who assert the song is inherently gay because the Y.M.C.A. “was apparently being used as some sort of gay hangout.”
He stated, “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,” Willis elaborated.
Describing the motive behind writing the song, Willis explained “the Y” was known for, “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.”
Now, the Village People co-founder is going on the offensive against outlets calling the song a gay anthem, stating, “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.”
Willis, who supported Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, previously explained he refused to ban Trump from using the track because it would be “stupid and just plain hateful” to do so.
It appears as if Donald Trump himself is becoming less of a social kryptonite as Americans wake up to the media’s lies about him being a Hitlerian dictator.