Village people not gay

The LGBTQ+ community readily adopted camp as a protective aesthetic to promote their lifestyle and values, but as Sontag already noted in 1964, camp is not gender or sexuality specific. 

Similarly, Trump plays on camp, with his derisive bluster protecting him from blowback — no one knows exactly when he's joking or not.

Reacting to the irony of Willis’ flip-flop, Newsweek pointed out that he is only one of the original Village People, the Village Idiot. He waxed on about dozens of VP performances on prime-time TV, entering the lives of American families with an “irresistible” song, seeing the “sharpest scalpel in the drawer” making clean incisions and planting a seed “making the audience think differently about people who were different from them.” 

Today, the Republican fixation on toxic masculinity and its obsessive homophobia are about to usher in a Lavender Scare 2.0.

 Still, like it or not, the impact the Village People have made over the decades is irreversible. You're not singing at a celebration but a funeral of American values," wrote Aundaray Guess, executive director at GRIOT Circle, a New York non-profit organization dedicated to eliminating all forms of oppression against minorities.

From gay icon to mainstream

Village People was created in 1977 by Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, French music producers who wanted to land hits in the US.

Though only Morali was openly gay, it was by attending gay disco parties in Greenwich Village that they came up with the concept of putting together a group of singers and dancers who would wear costumes embodying different gay fantasy figures: a cop, a Native American chief, a cowboy, a construction worker, a leather-clad biker and a sailor.

Village People was therefore a manufactured boy band like many others, but it was specifically designed to target the gay community, developed during a decade of crucial queer liberation and political activism that was also closely tied to disco culture.

Morali was "committed to ending the cultural invisibility of gay men," writes music historian Alice Echols in her book "Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture" (2010), quoting an interview the French music producer gave to Rolling Stone magazine in 1978: "I think to myself that gay people have no group," Morali said after outing himself as gay, "nobody to personalize the gay people, you know?"

While the group did play a key role in making gay culture visible, straight people didn't necessarily interpret the performers' style as gay macho drag, as Echols also notes in her book.

Village People's songs, which play on special male bonds in military regiments ("In the Navy") or at the Young Men's Christian Association's hostels ("Y.M.C.A."), were quickly adopted by the mainstream.

Indeed, from toddlers to senior citizens, anyone can have wholesome fun spelling out the letters Y M C A using arm movements to the hit song, without thinking about any possible double entendres related to the ways a young man can have fun staying at a YMCA. 

The Village People thereby contributed to presenting "urban gay macho identities as banal media products," concludes Echols.

'I gotta be a macho man'

Warming up his crowds with Village People's "Macho Man" at his rallies, Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda resonates with men who see feminism and the LGBTQ+ rights movements as threats, and who are trying to redefine their role through hypermasculinity — by embodying the hyperbolic macho man.

When analyzing how Donald Trump and the Village People fit unexpectedly well together, many authors refer to American critic Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp.'" As she explained in the essay, camp is a concept that is very difficult to define; it's rather something that can be recognized when you see it, that triggers the reaction "it's good because it's awful."

Camp "neutralizes moral indignation" through playfulness, Sontag argued.

Not to mention a backbone, for yourself," wrote one angry fan.

Meanwhile, other fans applauded the band for agreeing to perform with unity in mind.

"Congratulations! Interviewed a decade ago in 2014, he noted the band had since reached 122,000,000 records sold. There’s nothing gay about that," he wrote, noting that had instructed his wife to “start suing” news organizations who refer to the song as a “gay anthem."

Willis added that "Y.M.C.A." had "benefited greatly" from Trump's use at his rallies, noting that the song finally reached the No.

1 spot on the Billboard dance/electronic chart and was now generating "millions" of dollars in sales.

"The true anthem is Y.M.C.A.’s appeal to people of all strips (sic) including President Elect Trump," he concluded.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com