It might be fun to stay at the YMCA, but the song is not a “gay anthem.”
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So says the frontman of the Village People, who has taken to clarifying the matter some 46 years after the mega-hit was released.
Lead singer and lyricist Victor Willis is so adamant, he said he’s even willing to sue “each and every news organization” that refers to the song Y.M.C.A., either in headlines or the base of the story, as a gay anthem.
Willis wrote the 1978 smash hit with producer Jacques Morali and has taken to social media to insist it wasn’t written with the gay community in mind.
“There’s been a lot of talk, especially of late, that Y.M.C.A. is somehow a gay anthem,” Willis said on Facebook on Monday. “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.”
Added Willis: “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.’”
The song from the band’s third studio album Cruisin’ has for years been an informal anthem of the LGBTQ community.
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More recently, it has been embraced by President-elect Donald Trump, who has been playing it at presidential campaign rallies. A recent video posted online showed Trump dancing to the song along with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Mar-a-Lago over American Thanksgiving.
Willis initially objected to his song being used by Trump, but in his Facebook post, he gave the president-elect his blessing to use the song, which topped the Billboard chart for digital sales of dance and electronic music this week.
The YMCA — the Young Men’s Christian Association — was originally set up as a non-political Christian movement in London in 1844. It is commonly referred to as “the Y,” and has since become a global organization where men are welcome to come and exercise, play sports and seek shelter.
Willis said he wrote the song without knowing that the YMCA was “a hangout for gays.”
He said: “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.”
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Willis said he won’t hesitate to take legal action related to any supposed misuse of the song going forward.
“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,” he said.