Victor Willis, the founding lead singer of Village People and co-writer of "Y.M.C.A.," died on Monday, June 30, one day before his 75th birthday, after what the band called a short but aggressive illness. He was 74. The group announced his death on Facebook, and his wife, Karen Huff-Willis, confirmed it. [1][2]

Born in Dallas in 1951 and raised in San Francisco, Willis was a Baptist preacher's son who learned to sing in his father's church and worked on Broadway before the French producer Jacques Morali built a group around him in 1977. Village People dressed its members as macho American archetypes; Willis was the policeman and, later, the naval officer. "Y.M.C.A.," released in 1978, made them global, and he shared writing credit on it and on "Macho Man," "In the Navy" and "Go West." [4]

He left the group in 1980 and spent much of the next four decades in a quieter, harder fight — reclaiming the copyrights to the songs he had written. He won them back, rejoined the lineup in 2017, and became the only original member still touring under the name. [4] For a man remembered in costume, his most consequential work was legal: he insisted on owning what he made, and eventually did.

That ownership set up the strange third act. "Y.M.C.A." became a fixture of Donald Trump's rallies and the soundtrack to a viral "Trump dance." During Trump's first term, Willis asked him to stop playing it; later he reversed course, welcoming the renewed attention and the royalties it poured in, and performed the song at a pre-inauguration event in January 2025. [4] At the same time, he repeatedly threatened to sue news organizations that described the song as a "gay anthem," arguing that its lyrics — written by a straight man with one gay producer and one straight one — were never about gay sex. [3]

Here is the divergence he embodied better than any obituary can. Mainstream coverage files Willis as a disco pioneer, the voice behind an inescapable hit. On X, his death reopens a custody battle: whose anthem is "Y.M.C.A."? The Pride parades that adopted it, or the MAGA rallies that claimed it? The people who hear a gay standard, or the man who sued to deny it? Both readings are true, and Willis, uniquely, held the deed to the argument.

He spent his last years as the sole author of a song that means opposite things to opposite tribes, litigating both its meaning and its ownership, and declining to resolve either. The Pride crowd kept the chorus. The rally crowd kept the chorus. He kept the copyright. The ambiguity was never a problem to be solved; it was the asset.

Victor Willis died the day before the birthday, still the only original Village Person left standing, still cashing the checks on four chords that half the country thinks it understands and the other half is certain it does. He wrote it. In the end, that was the only claim that paid.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London