Dear Alex,
The indian was NOT femmy, to use your word.

The construction worker is appearing this week at a Fort Lauderdale bar, and Randy, the cowboy, is still a Manhattan nightlife fixture.

I had to good fortune to meet Randy while he was in Philadelphia on a local TV show (In Bed With Butch). He was a sweet guy and just as good looking in person.

It's amazing how out they were back then & how accepted. Everyone sang - and performed their songs. I saw people singing along to YMCA at more weddings than I can remember.

"It's enough to make a queer boy nostalgic for a time he never saw."

Certainly nostalgic for me, who did see it from the vantage point of my own coming out in the late 70's (and in my late 30's). It was especially fun to observe the phenomenon you describe about your teacher and "YMCA". I always felt that the Village People were rubbing a macho gay subtext into their straight listeners without the latter really having a clue of what it meant to be "in the Navy". Or did they?

Their one and only Hollywood movie, "Can't Stop The Music" was pretty hokey, but if you haven't seen it it's at least worth the all-too-short football team shower scene.

Alex, it's so funny you should post about Village People this week, because I was just thinking about them last week when I was writing about Adam Lambert. They seem like one of the greatest camp conspiracies of all time, the open secret that middle Americans just love, love, love but don't quite know why. I'll never forget when I asked my mother how come we were allowed to dance to YMCA in kindergarten when TVP were so gay. She just looked really crestfallen, like "the Village People were gay?" and changed the subject.

Last night I went to a baseball game in Round Rock, Texas, and the crowd went wild for YMCA.

Thanks for posting these other clips!

One of the reasons that TVP were so popular (and still are?) is that straights, like the rest of us, can be remarkably adept at being stupid or "playing" stupid --- even to themselves.

Part of the TVP phenomenon is that, as is apparent in the above video clip, they were allowed to use a real US Navy aircraft carrier to shoot the original In the Navy video ... and in return, legend has it that the US Navy actually wanted rights to use either the song soundtrack or clips from the video in their actual recruiting spots. Supposedly, it had to be explained repeatedly that "maybe this isn't such a great idea" before the Navy brass became convinced and dropped the notion.

Now, why don't we have bands "as cool as" TVP in today's world?

For one thing, Alex, with all due respect, you are re-writing history --- or at best, re-editting it. During their heyday, along with their popularity in some cirlces, there was also a redneck backlash against them and the disco world in general; remember, the major economic engines behind disco were gays and black divas. Very soon after the rave over the BeeGee's and Travolta's Saturday Night Fever died down, rednecks came up with the motto "Disco sucks" and placed stickers that said same under the rifles and shotguns they mounted in the rear windows of their enormous pick-up trucks.

Three decades later we can now afford to be nostalgic, but during the 80's and 90's both TVP and disco were the butt of jokes that contained the subtext, "What where we thinking?"

Typo mea culpa: Of course, I meant to write "What were we thinking?"

Those years are all a blur.