Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.

• Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp”

Macho Types Wanted. Must Dance and Have a Moustache.

• Advertisement in the Village Voice, 1978, as quoted in Midgley, Alex. “‘Macho Types Wanted: The Village People, Homophobia, and Representation in the 1970s,” Australasian Journal of American Studies (2014): 104-119.

A friend last week (ironically, I think, and/or with disgust) texted a link to the U.S. Department of Interior’s July 4th video – all fireworks and Mount Rushmore and eagles and shit, a peppy presenter talking about America’s awesomeness, with the thumping disco beat in the background of the Village People’s 1978 pop cult classic YMCA.

Wait, what? YMCA is a camp queer anthem, right? I mean, look at those guys! I don’t think that song means what you think it means.

The Death of the Author

In her 1964 essay Notes on “Camp,” Susan Sontag said this, in discussing how to understand camp: “One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.”

Sontag’s point is a side road in a complex attempt to get her arms around the aesthetic of what she called “camp.” Writing three years later, the French literary critic Roland Barthes was more direct, arguing in his essay “The Death of the Author” that what matters in understanding a work is what ends up in the brain of the reader, viewer, listener, not who the author was or what they intended. But, holy moly, the Village People were pretty explicit back in the late 1970s about what they intended. Here’s Alex Midgley in a marvelous 2014 essay about YMCA (Can I share my delight in the fact that there’s a scholarly literature on “YMCA”?):

[W]hen first interviewed by Rolling Stone in 1978, the French producer Jacques Morali – the mastermind and chief songwriter of the group – outed himself and emphasised that increased cultural visibility was to be the very point of the Village People. ‘I think to myself that the gay people have no [musical] group,’ he said, ‘nobody to personalise the gay people, you know?’ Here, Morali had found a culturally unsatisfied, commercially unexploited niche in popular music, and determined that the Village People’s mix of iconic American masculinity, gay innuendo, and maddeningly catchy disco hooks was the perfect fit.

In his book A Queer History of the United States, Michael Bronski details how the YMCA became such an important institution for male gay culture in the U.S. In a rapidly urbanizing United States, the YMCA was a place for generally young single men (there are parallel stories for women) to gather. By the 1930s, Bronski writes, the chaste and spiritual nature of the “C” in the institution’s name was living side by side with what had become “a visible and internationally noted place for homosexual men to find one another for sex and socializing.”

The signalling could not, to my ears, be more clear:

It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
They have everything for young men to enjoy
You can hang out with all the boys

Here again is Midgley:

From the Stonewall Riots of 1969, to the election of Harvey Milk in 1978, and at countless points in between and after, gay people were being seen affirming their rights as citizens and creating strong queer communities. Being ‘out’ emerged as a more viable option, if only by degrees, as groups such as the Village People provided models of successful, positive, happy gay men that countered the spectre of sin, criminality, and illness that had accumulated around homosexuality over centuries.

Two decades separate John Rechy’s Cooper Do-Nuts Riot and the Village People, with Stonewall wedged in between, decades of a long and often painful emergence from the closet. So it’s easy to see why the camp genius of YMCA caught on in the discos of New York and San Francisco. But then something weird happened that is what makes Barthes so important, Sontag ever confusing, and YMCA a remarkable modern cultural object.

YMCA became a hit in still-homophobic middle America. And the Village People embraced this. Again, Alex Midgley is our guide:

While ‘Y.M.C.A.’ was written partly as a paean to the opportunities for gay socialisation and sex that the YMCA facilities provided, nothing was ever made explicit. Audiences so inclined could easily interpret the song as an anodyne appreciation for the Y, an organisation that promoted good Christian masculine values and responsibilities, rather than having anything to do with homosexuality. With ‘Y.M.C.A.’ the Village People became what the historian and self-professed ‘discologist’ Alice Echols calls America’s ‘first gay-to-straight crossover group. That is, the first (and only) disco act whose image and original following was gay but managed to cross over into straight discos.’ With their newfound audience, the Village People – who had never shied away from discussions of their sexuality – suddenly changed tack, refusing to comment on their sexual orientations.

Barthes and the question of authorial intent

The question raised by Roland Barthes is important to me, the “author” whose thousands of deaths (for each of the thousands of thing I have written and sent off into the world) he is summoning.

Very early in my career as a newspaper reporter, I learned an empirical version of Barthes’ concept: I wrote. People stayed up late into the night editing, typesetting, and printing my words, then driving around town throwing them on people’s driveways. When readers plucked the morning paper off of their driveway, they saw only my words, with no access to my intent. They would often work backwards from the words to infer my intent: the newspaper is the voice of The Man, Fleck’s clearly liberal/conservative (generally the opposite of the reader’s self-identity). But most importantly for my craft, if I wrote clumsily the goods I intended to get into a reader’s brain didn’t arrive undamaged.

So, yeah, Barthes resonates for me in a very practical way.

But in the last decade, as I left newspapering for the contemplative life of A Guy Who Writes Books, my relationship to Barthes, to the question of authorial intent, shifted. My books don’t stand alone, but rather exist in relationship to the public persona I present about them: I speak at conferences, and talk to reporters, and write blog posts, and appear on podcasts. The work here is not the book itself. Rather, the book is the platform on which the work as a whole stands – all the stuff I have to say, where my explicit signalling of authorial intent becomes part of the work.

While I can’t claim the stature or revenue stream of the Village People, the relationship to authorial intent is similar. It’s not just the song. It’s the stage show, the public statements, the explicit way in which they group revised their signals of authorial intent as YMCA moved out of the Haight and into the Holiday Inn. “No,” they seem to be signalling to the crowd cheerfully doing the Y-M-C-A arm gestures during the seventh inning stretch, “we’re not the gay band.”

But we get the camp wink, as my family joins in to the seventh inning stretch pantomime, what we joyously call “the gay song.” Which is why my “moved out of the Haight” metaphor breaks down, because the song now lives a double life as both a queer anthem and a MAGA anthem, simultaneously in the Haight* and in the Holiday Inn. It doesn’t matter what the authors intended. What matters is the way the audience embraces the work, and lordy but haven’t we embraced YMCA with a rich enthusiasm?

Acknowledgments: A special thanks to the four anonymous individuals who helped me workshop this material (my family and friends are kind and thoughtful with my practice), with particularly useful Bill Evans on vinyl and avgolemono chicken stew.

* Haight-Ashbury seems to no longer be “the Haight” of my cultural reference, grant me a nostalgia for the 1980s, my young adulthood, a time before AIDS and San Francisco’s decline.