Which village person was gay

And what happened to the 7 million people he said would welcome him in the streets? I find it amusing beyond description that trump entered the stadium in India to the song Macho Man blaring from the sound system. The very stable genius doesn't realize the song is a gay anthem. With his obvious disregard for gay rights, it's another sign of his ignorance.

I guess trump doesn't realize the Village People were a campy gay group giving a winkie to those in the know. Too funny. Village People, however, maintains that Trump has "remained respectful" in his use of its songs and "has not crossed a line" or suggested that the group endorses him. But because of the fact that we did have a gay following, it probably helped us because it broaden the spectrum for our music. I do think the group, whether gay or straight, still would have been popular.

Of course, on every song there were those double entendres. And then the songs where choreographed to the lyrics and music. Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.

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Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. Ad Choices. The best known of them bobbed up before Superior Court Judge Mark Forcum on 5 September, in San Mateo, California, at what he promised would be the end of a history of brushes with the law.

This was Victor Willis, aka the original Village Cop, front man, singer, one of the band's heterosexual minority and lyricist of its most passable material. This winter is due to mark a long-awaited renaissance of Willis's career, after a quarter of a century spent in a haze of drug abuse and blanket refusal to sing the old hits. Willis has suddenly commissioned a biography recalling his best and worst days - due out in January - and, through his publicist Alice Wolf, announces that come summer he may go back on the road, record and, who knows, sing 'YMCA' once again.

Willis faced - as his lawyer Mark Geragos put it - 'double digits' in jail for a concoction of drugs and firearms offences, and for serially jumping bail. He is, said prosecutor Elaine Tipton, 'quite frankly a classic case of someone who does not deserve probation'. But the court took pity. The judge warned Willis, however, that this was his last chance: 'If you violate probation in any shape or form, you're going to prison. That's a form of motivation too.

And what of the other Villagers in the band, formed back in ? Why, they are still at it, including three of the original cast, still bawling out 'YMCA'. Indeed, apart from a two-year break, the Village People never stopped, notching up an average gigs a year. There isn't a cruise ship, county fair or corporate wedding they won't perform for. Or, indeed, if you'd been on the guest list for the Prince of Morocco's private summer party in , or a show for retired Japanese women in Tokyo.

Less surprisingly, you'd have caught them at the Asbury Park gay pride festival in New Jersey this summer. And last 18 August, the headline attraction at San Mateo County Fair in California was the Village People - while Victor Willis languished in his cell, less than a mile away from the stage.

Like Boney M and the Spice Girls to follow, the Village People were a manufactured product, more panto package than pop group. They were moulded by French producers Henri Bololo and Jaques Morali, who found Willis - son of a Baptist pastor who had launched his son's voice in the church choir - singing in The Wiz on Broadway.

They were instantly struck and Willis duly transferred to Casablanca studios then of Donna Summer fame to record a debut album with session musicians and background singers, none of whom were members of the band-to-be. Not until Morali went to a gay disco called Les Mouches in Greenwich Village did the notion occur to entwine his studio tapes with what he beheld: a floorshow of macho homosexual stereotypes in 'theme' fancy dress.

Morali, himself gay, spotted a professional dancer, Felipe Rose, shaking his stuff in an Indian headdress with bells on his toes, and the idea dawned: a troupe of brazen homosexual fantasy figures singing hit tunes aimed at a gay audience. Morali put out an advertisement seeking: 'Gay singers and dancers, very good-looking and with moustaches' - a nod to the then voguish Freddie Mercury factor. Television actor Randy Jones was appointed cowboy and the front man, Willis, would be a cop.

All came from Greenwich Village, and the band's name thereby chose itself. The racy entendre was slapdash compared to some Seventies music being written in the heterosexual hemisphere, but what marked the Village People was that, with the 'YMCA', 'Macho Man', 'Go West' and 'In the Navy', a Rubicon had been crossed: the first 'out' gay band hit the mainstream.

Whether the Village People were intended in earnest, as irony or a combination of both, their appeal - with young Madonna as an opening act for some shows - extended way beyond the homosexual hallmark they represented, across dance floors astride the Iron Curtain and the equator. The US Navy - whether or not it realised the song was a paean to sex-sur-mer - considered using 'In the Navy' as a recruiting jingle, and a deal was done whereby it could do so in exchange for the band being allowed to record a video in San Diego with the Pentagon's co-operation.

This was forthcoming, the taxpayer duly providing a cast of hundreds of military extras and plenty of naval hardware. In the event, the Navy stuck with its traditional 'Anchors Aweigh', but as Village sailor Briley says: 'We still got the video out of it, and it's been very successful. For all their wide appeal, the band's core following and cult status was among those whom they and their lyrics represented - the gay community, or part of it, especially in the city emerging as gay capital of the world, to which Willis moved, and for which he wrote two hit songs: San Francisco.

At that time, this entailed being an emblem whether the Village People liked it or not of a world - just before the Aids pandemic was recognised for what it was - which would make most present-day gay activists, as well as the Christian Coalition, flinch. Indeed, it was a time - and the Castro district was a place - when the gay scene was like a Christian Coalition caricature of itself: a 'fisting', 'felching' planet of bath house 'glory holes'.

A playground planet oblivious - indeed, contemptuous - of the emerging notion of 'safe sex', described by the despairing writer Randy Shilts who himself died of Aids in his apocryphal book And The Band Played On: safe sex brochures ritually burned during orgies in the bath houses, fuelled by mutually administered injections of methadrine, through surgical tubing so that the veins bulged.

Even post-Aids, the Village People remained iconic in this world when, in , the bath houses re-opened in San Francisco. I remember their songs being piped along the corridors, entwined with softer electronic music, at the Berkeley Steamworks as the Tannoy announced to those cruising that: 'Oscar has just become available in cubicle eight, if anyone is interested in visiting Oscar' - splayed face-down by the open door, legs akimbo.