Victor Willis, the only unambiguously heterosexual policeman in the annals of popular music, has finally hung up his handcuffs, one day shy of his seventy-fifth birthday – a timing so neat it suggests even mortality couldn’t resist a disco beat. Born in 1951, the son of a San Francisco Baptist minister, Willis arrived in New York with a voice trained in gospel and a constitutional immunity to irony.
While others in the Village People were busy auditioning for posterity in leather chaps, Willis – resplendent in his regulation cop uniform – insisted that “Y.M.C.A.” was merely a wholesome hymn to physical fitness and male camaraderie. One admired the sheer audacity of a straight man fronting what looked like a mobile Gay Pride float and then treating the resulting global innuendo as someone else’s problem. It was like watching a teetotaller conduct an open-bar party and claiming the punch was fruit cordial.
Jacques Morali, the French producer who assembled the group like a novelty cake, recognised in Willis the perfect straight man – in every sense. Willis wrote or co-wrote the hits that turned disco into a worldwide municipal anthem: “Macho Man,” “In the Navy,” and “Go West.”, for which the crowning irony arrived in 1993 when the Pet Shop Boys covered it. Where Willis had offered a straight man’s pep talk to the frontier, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe delivered a flamboyant, wistful, orchestral sigh of knowing resignation. It was as if the Village People’s cop had been gently arrested by reality and remanded into the custody of those who understood the joke all along.
There were the usual rock-star detours – drugs, arrests, a spell in the wilderness – but Willis outlasted most of his colleagues and the entire disco era itself. He won copyright battles that secured his royalties, returned to touring, and maintained, with heroic literal-mindedness, that young men at the Y were simply enjoying 'straight fun.' In an age of compulsory ambiguity, his refusal to wink was almost avant-garde.
He leaves a wife, Karen, and a catalogue that will outlive us all. Whenever strangers throw their hands in the air at weddings, sports events or political rallies, they are performing an unwitting act of Willis worship. The man who sang about the Navy never went down with the ship. He simply sailed on, straight as a die, while the rest of us wondered what the joke was.