Victor Willis, the original lead singer for the iconic disco group the Village People, died on Tuesday after “a short but aggressive illness,” according to an announcement posted to the band’s social media. He was 74.
Willis was recruited as the group’s lead singer by gay French music producer Jacques Morali, who targeted disco’s massive gay following with the Village People’s first album in 1977. Only after it was a hit did Morali actually form the group: In 1978, he scouted Willis’ bandmates in New York gay clubs and with classified ads that read, “Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance And Have A Moustache.”
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Among the six original singers styled as iconic gay fantasies, Willis was the only straight performer. He played the cop.
The group scored big hits during disco’s heyday in the late 1970’s, including “Macho Man,” “In the Navy,” and “Go West.”
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“Y.M.C.A.,” the group’s most enduring gay anthem, appeared on the Village People’s third album, “Cruisin’,” and hit No. 1 in 17 countries with its release in October 1978.
In recent years, Willis’ relationship with the song became problematic for gay fans of the group.
In his campaign for reelection in 2020, President Donald Trump began adding “Y.M.C.A.” to his eclectic rally playlist, often “dancing” to the tune at the end of appearances. His fans ate the performances up.
Willis later said he received thousands of complaints about Trump playing the anthem and asked the president “to stop using Y.M.C.A. because his use had become a nuisance to me.”
But the singer later changed his tune, writing that Trump “seems to genuinely like ‘Y.M.C.A.’ and he’s having a lot of fun with it.” Willis allowed continued use of “my song.”
The “financial benefits,” he added in a Facebook post after Trump’s second election, “have been great.”
Willis performed “Y.M.C.A.” at President Trump’s pre-inauguration rally in January 2025.
The singer and songwriter spent years litigating ownership of the band’s rights and material following the death of the band’s creator, Morali, from AIDS in 1991. At the time Willis’ death, he was the only original member performing with the group.
While the band was created with gay iconography by a gay man for a gay audience, Willis argued from the beginning that the Village People wasn’t a gay group.
In a 1979 interview with Rolling Stone, he said that the Village People had “never performed gay.”
“The group performs a masculine show,” Willis said. “Gay people like us, straight people like us. But we’re not a gay group.”
As for “Y.M.C.A.,” French producer Morali reportedly wrote an outline of the song’s melody and chorus in about 20 minutes, after Randy Jones, the Village People’s cowboy, introduced him to the YMCA in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
“Those visits with me planted a seed in him, and that’s how he got the idea for ‘Y.M.C.A.,’” Jones said.
David Hodo, the band’s construction worker, agreed.
“Was the song written to celebrate gay men at the Y.M.C.A.? Yes. Absolutely. And gay people love it,” he said.
Willis, however, maintained to the end that the “Y.M.C.A.” he wrote was “straight.”
“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 said in his post-election “Y.M.C.A.” explainer on Facebook.
To those who think “YMCA” must be “a message to gay people,” the singer’s own message was: “Get your minds out of the gutter. It is not.”
Willis added that beginning in January 2025, coincidentally or not with Trump’s second inauguration, he would sue any news organization that “falsely refers” to “Y.M.C.A.” as a “gay anthem.”
Just this May, Trump went on a “Y.M.C.A.” riff at the Villages retirement community in Florida, falsely claiming he sent the song to No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and shaving 14 years off the song’s — and by extension, his own — age.
In a post to Truth Social following Willis’ death, Trump praised him as “a great and happy guy” and also praised himself for making “Y.M.C.A” a “‘Monster’ hit again.”
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