'Y.M.C.A.' Is a Gay Anthem

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The idea of providing purely nonpartisan news sounds good, right? Well, that’s what today’s advertiser, 1440 News, is all about. Are they any good at it? No clue. But for each of you who clicks their ad, I get $1. Click the darn thing!

Also: I’m running the first Trying! survey! As I head into the first round’s final 20 or so essays, I want to hear what you’d like to see in Round 2.

One of the most gratifying things about Trying! is that almost every day I get a message from a subscriber saying something along the lines of “This was the best one yet!” Now, it’s rarely more than one of those per day, and so far I’ve never heard from the same reader twice¹, but still, it’s wonderful that enough people are reading these with enough frequency, and with a critical enough eye, that they can pick out favorites.

Part of the wonder is because, when you’re a writer, you have little control over how people read your work. You can slave away for days, weeks, or in my case 90 minutes, crafting and re-crafting your sentences to hit just the right emotional pitch, to select the most effective vocabulary, to build a dramatic arc that will keep readers going to the end—and then an editor might slap on a headline that frames the story somehow differently, so readers view your work in another context that changes the meaning. Or let’s not even blame the editors—that’s too easy, anyway. Sometimes the readers just interpret your words other than how you’d hoped. This might mean they misconstrue your meaning, or this might mean they see connections and references you hadn’t meant at all, or hadn’t even known you meant. Early on in my career, I learned that readers read the story they want to read, not necessarily the story I wrote.

If you want to maintain any sense of sanity as a writer, you have to learn to accept this, because you cannot control it. Your name may be attached to the story, you may have a public presence beyond your byline, but you don’t exist, and you certainly can’t dictate its meaning: The work now belongs to its audience, who will make use of it as they wish, finding significance where and how and when they like, regardless of your intentions.

This has been true for a very long time, but especially since 1967, when the literary critic Roland Barthes published “The Death of the Author,” a short essay in which he said pretty much what I just did, only in fancier language and with, like, you know, literary-historical argumentation and solid academic credentials.

“The author,” he wrote, “still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work.” This remains true, sadly, and Barthes sees it as a kind of tyranny that limits how we interpret and understand that work: “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.” Oh, we figured out what the Author meant—we’re all done here!

Instead, he says, “the true locus of writing is reading.” I think here he’s specifically referring to paid newsletter subscribers, but I could be wrong. What’s cooler is he sees reading, and the infinite interpretations that result from it, as a form of rebellion against authority: “Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a ‘secret,’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.”

And that’s precisely why I’m getting into this heady lit-theory stuff: because of the Village People.

More after the highly clickable ad…

I’m Angry That the Village People Are Making Me Write About the Village People

Here’s the whole stupid backstory: The Village People are performing at the stupid Trump inauguration next week, because Donald Trump loves to play “Y.M.C.A.” at his stupid rallies, which strikes a lot of people as stupid because the stupid song is obviously a gay anthem and Trump, well, let’s just say he should not be seen as an ally. Here’s the BBC on how Trump fell in love with the Village People:

Also, they note, MAGA people are nostalgic for the past—like, say, the 1970s, when the Village People were “hip” and when things seemed better (but were not), or at least their backs didn’t hurt and their kids hadn’t rejected them for their stupid politics.

On top of that, Victor Willis—one of the Village People—took to Facebook in early December 2024 to protest loudly that “Y.M.C.A.” was not a gay anthem (which it is), and he should know because he co-wrote it:

I don’t know if Trying! counts as a news organization, but as far as I can tell it is now January 2025. Of course, Mrs. Victor Willis will not sue me, or anyone, over this truly stupid claim, no matter how we attempt to illicit a reaction. And technically, I have referred to “Y.M.C.A.” correctly, not falsely, as a gay anthem: No one is claiming Willis intended in his lyrics to describe a certain niche of the gay hookup scene of the 1970s—he says he conceived of the song as an ode to Black brotherhood—only that he did happen to describe it, and well enough for fans to understand the words “in their duplicity,” as Barthes would put it, and to adopt them as an anthem.

Whether Willis was aware of this or not is immaterial. When you create something, anything, for the public, you cede control over its reception. It could be an essay or a novel, a played-out disco tune or Erik Satie. You could even be a chef and we could be talking about your signature black cod with miso. While your thoughts and insights about what went into its creation may be interesting, even enlightening, and while you may earn millions from your labors, you are not the most important element here. The work is—and what the work is lies in how we “read” it, what it means, how it tastes. You, my dear Author, are dead to us² .

Of course, this is what Bad Guys—fascists, oligarchs, bullies—always try to do: claim ownership over everything, even (or especially) words and ideas. They need everyone to shut up, accept their interpretations, no matter how blatantly skewed or idiotic, and go on about our business. They can’t imagine a world in which an Author does not dictate meaning to the masses, because that would be a world they can’t control. And so they try, through threats of legal action and actual violence, to cow us into meekly going along to get along. As that guy who’s about to become president said back in 2016, “It's just words, folks. It is just words.“ His don’t matter, and neither do ours, so just trust him when he tells you what they really mean.

But the world you and I inhabit, my dear readers, is one where we decide what words mean to us, where we give them their meaning, where we can recognize truth from fantasy³, and where no one, for better or worse, has a monopoly on interpretation. As Barthes put, we are “the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys.” We choose our own anthems⁴, regardless of the co-Author’s semiliterate proclamations, and if and when we can invert the domineering desires of those copyright holders who’ve chosen the Dark Side, we have a duty to do so, and to do so joyfully. So sing, dance, and contort your body into a wan simulacrum of certain letters I’ll decline to name, for tomorrow this newsletter may be sued out of existence! 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Maybe Good and I Might Like It: The Death of the Author

By sheer coincidence, this book was released on Tuesday. I’m not necessarily a huge fan of author Nnedi Okorafor’s writing, but she’s always at least interesting and thoughtful, and since this new novel is described as a cross between Yellowface (which I liked) and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which I had some problems with), I’m all over it. Check it out?

Notes

1. “I know I said ‘Why Drink?’ was the best, but I was wrong: ‘That’s So Brooklyn’ is better!”

2. I’ve always felt like Barthes’s theory should be the starting point for discussing literature these days, but it isn’t. Can anyone tell me why? Did it fall out of favor, or was it just replaced by trendier theories?

3. Perhaps the key difference between us and the MAGA people: We have a better appreciation for reality, even when it’s not the reality we’d prefer.

4. To be fair, this is precisely what the MAGA folk have done with “Y.M.C.A.”

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