s a song about illegal gay sex after Trump used it on his rally. In 2020 Willis even threatened legal action against anyone who would describe Y.M.C.A. I’m happy the gay community adopted it as their anthem, I have no qualms with that.” But I wanted to write a song that could fit anyone’s lifestyle. ‘You can hang out with all the boys’ was a term about me and my friends playing basketball at the Y. I wrote it about hanging out in urban neighbourhoods in my youth. “YMCA was not written to be a gay song because of the simple fact I’m not gay. Over the years, Village People have often been asked if Y.M.C.A.’s lyrics explicitly geared to double meanings that could be welcomed by gay audiences. And although the band were openly gay and tended to target that specific audience whenever they could, lyrics’ author and Village People founder Victor Willis means it as a song about inclusion and social relationships of young people new to the neighborhood . As he states in this 2017 interview :
stands for Young Men’s Christian Association, an international association that helped teenagers and young people who moved to the city, offering cheap accommodation to those in need, or sporting activities in gyms, in the name of a Christian spirit. Apparently it was also an easy way for young homosexuals to meet other peers when you were new in the city, and this caused the entire homosexual community to set it up as a community anthem. Y.M.C.A. is at the same time the most famous gay anthem in the history of music and one of the best known disco songs ever. Composed practically by chance by Village People and released in 1978, the song quickly became a huge success, both in the gay community of the time and subsequently in any context where you need a song to get people going, be it at a wedding, in a nightclub or a bar.Īs the Village People used to do in their songs, YMCA’s lyrics contain several allusions that can be easily noticed by a gay audience. Specifically, Y.M.C.A.