If Willis is uncomfortable with his song’s universally understood message of giving someone directions to a good shower to have sex in, he’s also uncomfortable with the Trump campaign’s use of it. So the line “You can do whatever you feel” is meant to be taken at face value, and a man whose uniform consists of a MAGA hat and an ill-fitting suit would be at ease dancing next to a cowboy and a construction worker, all of them totally straight. Victor Willis, the Village People frontman - he’s also the nightstick-wielding cop as well as the one who wrote the song - is an out-and-out heterosexual, and he said as recently as September of this year that he’ll sue anyone who suggests that 'Y.M.C.A.' is about sweaty man-on-man lovin’ at the gym. LGBTQ outlet PinkNews tartly referred to it as “a song that’s definitely, definitely not about gay sex.”Įxcept actually, it’s not that simple. Few among us have the attention span for a two-minute commercial for anything, let alone a supercut with no narrative arc or variation that isn’t edited tightly enough to keep Trump’s fists-and-knees dance moves on the beat, but it went viral. On Monday, in one of its final pre-Election Day pushes, the Trump campaign released a video of the president’s metronome-like torso oscillating to it for a full two minutes.

He gyrates to it seemingly everywhere he goes, on elevated platforms or in front of Air Force One, for fans who can’t get enough of the only single from the 1978 Village People record 'Cruisin'.' Lyrically, it’s a vision of a pre-AIDS, pre-internet sexual innocence, both in terms of the young man’s naivete as well as the wider society’s ignorance that gay sex was taking place in a gym that’s ostensibly for devout followers of Christ.Īnd yet “Y.M.C.A.” is also a staple of Donald Trump’s campaign rallies.

Trump my way song