The Real Story Of The YMCA That Inspired The Village People's Gay Anthem

The Village People in 1980

In the 40 years since the Village People released “YMCA,” the song has become a cultural touchstone: a gay anthem famous for its innuendos and double entendres about young, fit men “having a good time,” as well as a staple at Yankees games and bar mitzvahs.

The song has also immortalized the Young Men's Christian Association in pop culture. Yet former residents of the McBurney Y in Chelsea — the building that inspired the song, and which was featured in the video released in late 1978 — say the reality of stays at the YMCA in those days was more complicated than the lyrics portray, with gay culture and working-class workouts coexisting in a single communal space.

“There was certainly a party aspect to their video and that time was the height of all the gay clubs in Chelsea,” recalls Davidson Garrett, who lived at the McBurney Y from 1978 through 2000. “[The YMCA] did have some overlapping of gay cruising. But it was a serious gym for people who really wanted to go and work out every day, and a nice place to live for working-class people.”

It was around May 1978 when part of the ceiling of Garrett’s Hell’s Kitchen one-bedroom apartment fell in, and the then 26-year-old actor and taxi driver put down $40 for what was supposed to be a week stay at the McBurney Y. The temporary arrangement became a 22-year stay.

“It turned out that I actually liked room living,” Garrett said. “It was in that room where I was able to finish my college education, where I was able to do acting auditions and work in the theater and know that I had a place to come back to that wasn’t going to cost an arm and a leg to pay for.”

Several months after Garrett moved in, the Village People filmed exterior shots of the McBurney branch for the “YMCA” video.

Paul Groth, the author of Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, notes that some of those occupying single room residences in the ‘70s would have somewhat resembled the men pictured in the video — in their 20s or 30s, a mix of white-collar and blue-collar residents, along with retired seniors and veterans. Garrett adds undergraduate students and disabled men to the mix of ethnically and racially diverse renters, about half of whom he estimates were gay.

“At first I came to a 32nd Street residency, but a guy who lived there told me it was cheaper at McBurney,” says Joseph Kangappadan, a former MTA and Post Office employee who began staying at the McBurney YMCA in 1969 after immigrating from England. “[McBurney] was safe. There were no cameras, but there was security, and it was very quiet. And I was crazy about working out, so the gym was my second home.”

The old McBurney YMCA (Elvert Barnes / Flickr)

The types of characters depicted in the “YMCA” video were, in fact, more likely to reflect temporary occupants than long-term renters, who mostly lodged there to relax and sleep between shifts. Often gay and in their 20s or 30s, the weekend guests used the YMCA “as a dressing room,” and as a place to discreetly hook up, Garrett says.

“The weekend party people who would stay there really just needed the rooms to crash,” says Garrett. “They didn’t stay there at all to socialize, but to take in the nightlife.”

Popularized at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution amid rapid city population growth, single-room occupancy residences featured one-room units often containing just a bed, with shared use of a kitchen and bathroom facilities. They largely disappeared starting in the late 1970s, after decades of concern over poor living conditions, social demonization of the poor, and an aggressive real estate development push under New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

In this once-booming ecosystem, the YMCA’s stricter policies made it distinctive from the divided brownstones, converted lofts, or hotel housing that rented single rooms elsewhere in the city.

“There was more supervision of your social life — a kind of management as to how you behaved — in the Y than there would be in a commercial rooming house, which mostly wanted to make sure the rooms were rented,” Groth says.

The available social amenities were in fact much less substantial than that depicted in the lyrics of “you can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal, you can do whatever you feel.” The 50 to 100 or so men who lived at any given time in the 23rd Street building’s nine floors of nearly 200 rooms had a 10 p.m. curfew and no access to a cafeteria or shared social spaces beyond the gym. The bathrooms were clean, but like a “gym locker room facility,” according to Garrett. Meanwhile, housekeepers came not just to offer towels and change your sheets, but to keep an eye on you, Kangappadan recalls.

Part of the song’s charm, of course, is its competing interpretations: It can be read equally well as a celebration of gay culture or of the working man. And as a Spin oral history revealed on the song's 30th anniversary ten years ago, even the group itself didn't agree on the proper interpretation.

David Hodo (“the construction worker”) insisted to Spin that Jacques Morali, the French producer who helped create the group and co-wrote the song with lead singer Victor Willis (“the cop”), certainly had the gay community in mind when he came up with the song. Randy Jones (“the cowboy”) retorted, “Do you have the lyrics in front of you? There’s nothing gay about them.”

Jones, who was a Y member at the time, insists to Gothamist that the band's artistic intent wasn’t to produce a gay anthem. However, he admits that it’s okay to read it as one. The YMCA was, after all, a welcoming, inclusive space where any man could (mostly) get what he needed.

The YMCA later became home to a David Barton gym; it's now a Crunch Fitness. (Elvert Barnes / Flickr)

“I think you can go into the lyrics of ‘YMCA,’ and if you are a straight jock who worked out at the Y, you are going to perceive it one way,” Jones says. “But if you happen to be a gay man and have the experience and perspective of hooking up with each other, it’s another way it can be perceived.”

Karen Tongson, a queer studies scholar and associate professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California, says both the history of the McBurney branch and the “YMCA” video’s dual legacy are right in line with the way queerness has long existed in real life and pop culture.

“A lot of queer expression has happened through innuendo,” Tongson said. “That’s essentially how queer popular culture has existed — as something that could be read in multiple ways. There is a sense of having to be able to communicate with each other in plain sight, but without other people figuring it out.”

Abbey White is a freelance writer whose work has been in Vox, The Nation, Paste Magazine, and Bitch Media. You can follow her on Instagram @white.abbey.