By that point, President Trump had adopted YMCA as a theme song at his political rallies. Willis was not a fan, and unsuccessfully tried to get the song banned.
“I don’t endorse Trump, I’ve never endorsed Trump, nor has the Village People,” he told the BBC in 2020. “But because of the copyright laws in the United States, he’s able to play our music any time he wants to.”
However, he surprised fans last year by agreeing to take part in the politician’s second inauguration.
“We know this won’t make some of you happy to hear, however we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics,” he wrote on Facebook.
“Our song YMCA is a global anthem that hopefully helps bring the country together after a tumultuous and divided campaign where our preferred candidate lost.”
At the same time, Willis threatened to sue news publications who described the track as 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 said.
Instead, Willis claimed, the song’s lyrics were informed by his observations at YMCA branches in “urban areas of San Francisco”, where young men participated in “swimming, basketball, track, and cheap food and cheap rooms”.
“That was my interpretation of it,” he told the BBC in 2019. “I didn’t know anything about the lifestyle of other people that go there.
“For me, YMCA was about, like the last line says, ‘They can start you back on your way’. A person could go stay at the Ritz Carlton or the Hilton, or these expensive hotels. But if you don’t have that kind of money, you might have to go to the Y.”
Regardless of its origins, YMCA remains Willis’ biggest hit – reaching number one in 17 countries after its release in October 1978, and spawning a dance routine that’s a staple of wedding discos around the world.
In 2020 it was preserved for posterity by the National Recording Registry of the US Library of Congress as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”, and inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
