On a January evening in 2025, inside a Washington arena, the opening bars of a disco anthem filled the air, and a 78-year-old president-elect began his now-familiar shuffle, fists pumping at waist height. On stage, dressed in a police officer’s cap and uniform, Victor Willis led the Village People through the song that had, improbably, become the soundtrack of a second Trump inauguration. Sixteen months later, on 30 June 2026, his wife Karen-Huff Willis announced on Facebook that the singer had died following what the band described as a “short but aggressive illness”. He was 74, and his death came one day before his 75th birthday.

Willis was a son of a Baptist preacher from Texas, raised on gospel in San Francisco, who found his way to Broadway and then, in 1977, into the orbit of French producers Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo. They cast him as the frontman of a new concept group, the Village People, whose members adopted cartoonish masculine archetypes: a construction worker, a cowboy, a biker, a soldier, and Willis as the policeman. He co-wrote and sang lead on the group’s defining hits — “Macho Man”, “In the Navy”, “Go West”, and above all “Y.M.C.A.”, a song whose exhortation to young men to find community at the Young Men’s Christian Association was, from its 1978 release, embraced by gay audiences as a coded celebration of clandestine desire. Willis, however, spent decades rejecting that reading, threatening legal action against anyone who called it a gay anthem, even as the track was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry and the Grammy Hall of Fame.

He left the band in 1980, just as disco’s commercial peak faded, and descended into depression and cocaine addiction, later pleading guilty to possession in 2006. A long legal battle over copyright ended in 2015 with a federal jury awarding him 50% ownership of 13 Village People songs, a victory that paved the way for his return to the group in 2017. By then, “Y.M.C.A.” had acquired a second life. Donald Trump began using it at campaign rallies, and after initially demanding he stop — “I can no longer look the other way,” Willis wrote on Facebook in 2020 — the singer reversed course. He told Billboard in 2024 that the song had generated millions of dollars since Trump adopted it, and the band performed at a pre-inauguration rally in January 2025. “Let’s give President Trump a chance,” Willis wrote, while clarifying he had voted for Kamala Harris.

Viewed from Washington, the song’s journey from gay clubs to MAGA rallies became a case study in the plasticity of pop symbols. For many in the LGBTQ community, the sight of a Republican president dancing to what they considered a liberation anthem felt like a co-option; for Trump’s supporters, it was simply a catchy tune that energised crowds. Willis himself occupied the ambiguous space between, insisting the group was “not a political group” and would perform for anyone. He died on the eve of his birthday, as the United States prepared to mark its 250th independence anniversary, the song he co-wrote echoing across a nation still dancing to its beat.