'Ever hear that?' Report sheds light on Trump's fascination with 'gay national anthem'

For years, President-elect Donald Trump has played the song "Y.M.C.A." by the Village People at his campaign rallies. And now, the Village People will be performing the song at the Republican's second inauguration despite its prominent association with the LGBTQ+ community.

Vanity Fair reported Wednesday on the president-elect's fascination with the Village People's iconic song, which has been consistent since Trump's 2016 campaign for the White House. At first, the Village People — named after one of New York City's most liberal neighborhoods — were hesitant to tell Trump to stop using their song, writing in a 2020 Facebook post that their music is "all-inclusive."

"[C]ertainly everyone is entitled to do the ‘Y.M.C.A.’ dance, regardless of their political affiliation," they wrote, though the group also acknowledged that they would "prefer our music be kept out of politics."

Victor Willis, who is one of the founding members of the Village People, has gone back and forth on whether he approves of Trump's use of his song at events. After the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020 that spread across the country in the wake of George Floyd's murder, Willis wrote on Facebook that he could no longer "look the other way" after Trump threatened to deploy the U.S. military against protesters.

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Willis' wife, Karen (also the group's manager) sent Trump a cease-and-desist letter asking him to stop playing the song. However, former Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina told TMZ in 2023 that he would only take a cease-and-desist letter seriously if it was from a lawyer officially representing the group (as Beyoncé did last year with her song "Freedom"). Trump himself talked about his love for the song on a 2022 episode of the Nelk Boys podcast.

"You know what gets ’em rockin? ‘Y.M.C.A.,’” Trump said. “‘Y.M.C.A.’ gets people up and it gets them moving. YMCA,’ the gay national anthem. Did you ever hear that?”

That characterization rubbed Willis the wrong way, however, who insisted in a Facebook post last month that calling Y.M.C.A. a gay anthem was "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 added that erroneously calling it a gay anthem was to "shame the President Elect's use of the song."

The Village People have made millions of dollars from the song's increased popularity — a fact not lost on Tacopina, who said in his 2023 TMZ interview that the group "should be thankful that President Trump allowed them to get their name back in the press."

"I haven’t heard their name in decades. Glad to hear they are still around," he said.

Willis has also softened in his opinion on Trump's love of his music. In his December Facebook post, the Village People co-founder recalled a conversation with his wife in which he talked about switching from his position that Trump playing "Y.M.C.A." was a "nuisance" to embracing it.

“I said to my wife one day, hey, ‘Trump’ seems to genuinely like Y.M.C.A. and he’s having a lot of fun with it,” Willis wrote. “As such, I simply didn’t have the heart to prevent his continued use of my song in the face of so many artists withdrawing his use of their material.”

Click here to read Vanity Fair's full article.