Victor Willis, 74, the lead singer of the 1970s disco group Village People, has died, his team said Wednesday.
“We are profoundly sad to announce the death of VICTOR WILLIS, lead singer of Village People,” said a statement posted on the band’s official Facebook page.
“Victor passed on Tuesday June 30, 2026 of a short but aggressive illness,” it added. “Privacy is requested.”
His wife, Karen Huff Willis, later issued a similar statement on Facebook.
Texas-born Willis was a co-founder and the original lead singer for the band, whose hit singles included “Y.M.C.A.,” “Go West” and “In the Navy.”
President Donald Trump paid tribute to Willis in a statement on Truth Social, calling him “a great and happy guy who loved that I used his groups song, YMCA, at my Rallies.” He called it an “uplifting song” and said he would “think of Victor every time YMCA is played.”
Willis left the group in 1979 in hope of embarking on a solo career before he re-formed the flamboyant disco band in 2017, leading to disputes with some of his former bandmates.
“Y.M.C.A.,” the catchy 1978 song for which Willis often dressed up as a cop, had a resurgence in popularity after Trump began dancing to it at the end of his campaign rallies in 2020.
Willis said he got thousands of complaints about the use of the song at Trump’s events and had decided to ask him “to stop using Y.M.C.A. because his use had become a nuisance to me.”
He soon afterward concluded that Trump “seems to genuinely like Y.M.C.A. and he’s having a lot of fun with it. As such, I simply didn’t have the heart to prevent his continued use of my song,” he said in a lengthy statement in 2024. He added that the “financial benefits have been great” as a result.
Willis performed the song at Trump’s pre-inauguration rally in January 2025.
Willis also called it a “false assumption” that “Y.M.C.A.” was written to be a “gay anthem.”
He said he wrote the lyrics based on “the things I knew about the Y in the urban areas of San Francisco such as swimming, basketball, track, and cheap food and cheap rooms.”
