It was a weird sight watching an enormous homosexual Nineteen Seventies disco hit being carried out at Donald Trump’s 2025 pre-inauguration rally. Many outstanding artists from Beyoncé to Bruce Springsteen prohibit Trump from using their music. So why do Village People – a band synonymous with the 1970s gay liberation movement – enable their music to be related to a political motion that has fixed and repressive ideas about sexual identification and morality?
Village Folks’s latest incarnation has had a sophisticated relationship with the “make America great again” movement (Maga). In 2020, their track YMCA started that includes at Maga anti-lockdown rallies and shortly grew to become a outstanding track in Trump’s re-election marketing campaign.
On the time, the band requested Trump to not use its music and later supported Kamala Harris for the presidency in 2024. Since then Village Folks have dramatically modified tack.
To be clear, of the group that carried out at Trump’s pre-inauguration rally, solely one of many unique Village Folks stays. The band, put collectively by the homosexual producers Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo in 1978, was named after New York’s Greenwich Village homosexual scene.
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Within the Nineteen Seventies, the group was largely gay-fronted besides the primary recruit, lead singer and co-songwriter Victor Willis (generally the policeman, generally the admiral determine). Willis took management of the title and the hits in 2017 after an out-of-court settlement with co-owner Henri Belolo.
Willis is now the one member of the unique line up nonetheless performing beneath the official band title. Maybe to make sure mainstream recognition, he has tried to maneuver Village Folks away from its homosexual associations – the biography on the band’s web site makes no mention of the act’s significance to queer audiences. He recently wrote on Facebook that he’ll sue each information organisation that implies “YMCA is one way or the other a homosexual anthem”.
Nevertheless it’s troublesome to untangle Village Folks from queer historical past because it was the trendsetting homosexual neighborhood of underground disco tradition that made them well-known. Document firms chosen the songs and artists to advertise based mostly on how DJs reported their recognition within the hottest golf equipment. Many of those golf equipment have been homosexual dominated, and disco itself was tied up with the rising confidence of the homosexual liberation motion in America and the period of sexual liberalisation that adopted the Sixties.
Jacques Morali put collectively Village Folks figuring out the band may provide influential homosexual clubbers something they had always been denied: cultural illustration, and with it, acknowledgement of their existence.
It labored. One self-proclaimed “disco doll” writing to LGBTQ+ newspaper The Advocate in 1978 recalled first listening to Village Folks: “The music was highly regarded … and the phrases have been about us, about our scene. I couldn’t consider it.”
Village Folks’s innuendos and figuring out references to homosexual tradition usually went over the heads of many straight listeners. Songs like Macho Man and the group’s hypermasculine picture epitomised the “clone” movement in Nineteen Seventies homosexual tradition.
Queer males, lengthy derided for being effeminate, would bulk up on the fitness center and costume in leathers like bikers, successfully changing into extra of an embodiment of masculinity than straight males. Go West was a reference to San Francisco’s extra liberal surroundings for homosexual males. The YMCA was a spot to “hang around with all of the boys”.
However skyrocketing into the mainstream made Village Folks an ungainly match for homosexual disco tradition. This vibrant neighborhood needed their very own scene that was not a part of the mainstream. They felt betrayed by a band publicly denying their gayness as they juggled the hardcore gay viewers that had made them well-known alongside a family-friendly viewers.
The backlash was fierce. A 1978 letter to homosexual lib journal The Physique Politic declared: “The business exploiters are disguising it to achieve the commercially profitable straight viewers”, describing Village Folks as “traitors of the worst sort”.
However even when they grew to become momentarily unpopular within the hottest homosexual golf equipment, for a lot of LGBTQ+ folks, Village Folks’s hits have endured as anthems performed at queer nights and Delight occasions. Of their sound, look and sheer 1970-ness, they are undeniably camp icons.
Which in fact leads many to query why folks attending Trump’s rallies – hardly famous for their inclusivity – would embrace their music. One rationalization is that Maga audiences merely don’t care about previous homosexual associations because the music is easy, catchy and constructive.
One other is that identical to the Nineteen Seventies, the queer messaging of Village Folks’s music nonetheless goes over the heads of straight Maga audiences. Maybe regardless of its previous homosexual associations, they’re consciously making an attempt to culturally repurpose disco for their very own motion. Or they’re making an attempt to be ironic.
More than likely, although, the music may need a specific that means to LGBTQ+ audiences, it has different meanings relying on the context by which it’s performed. To many, Village Individuals are the epitome of a novelty, apolitical pop group. Their hits are related to weddings, kids’s events and good-time disco. The prosaic fact could also be that Trump followers simply take pleasure in a very catchy tune.
However for Trump’s crew, the usage of these songs is politically calculated towards their core supporters who’ve modified the lyrics of YMCA to “MAGA”. And don’t neglect Village Folks have been joined on the pre-inauguration rally by WWE wrestling’s Hulk Hogan. Each are nostalgic late Twentieth-century acts that experience blatant performances of muscled masculinity.
They appear to be the embodiment of that imagined previous of American virility that Trump vaguely refers to when he guarantees to make the nation “nice once more”. It’s not troublesome to work out what Trump’s message is, particularly when he dances alongside to Macho Man at rallies.
Each these acts are carnivalesque, like Trump himself. They point out an period of politics as spectacle, however beneath the floor messages, we should rigorously concentrate to what’s truly being mentioned and accomplished.
