The Day the Mafia Threatened Me at the YMCA

The Village People and a HOT gay steam room

The mobster stood up as the steam cleared, sweat dripping as he smiled and laughed. “So, you’re the one everybody’s talking about!”

He pulled a soggy towel over his hairy paunch. “You’se got balls, Tiger. Go get em!” Then his expression turned mean as he wagged a finger and patted me on the cheek — so hard my eyes watered. “But never forget who you’re dealing with, kid.That smart mouth could get your pretty face messed up bad.”

And that’s how the mob threatened me in New York City’s McBurney YMCA, the very same YMCA the Village People sang about in their campy gay classic.

They have everything for young men to enjoy, You can hang out with all the boys…

It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A. It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.

You can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal, You can do whatever you feel… ¹

A lot of myths surround the Village People’s celebrated anthem YMCA. One common misconception is that the Village People were all gay. In fact, the policeman, lead singer Victor Willis, was not. From 1978–1982 he was married to Phylicia Ayers-Allen, who played Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show.

Producers Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo put The Village People together in 1977 as a concept band designed to appeal to gay male audiences by parodying anti-gay stereotypes. Belolo was not gay, but Morali was, and he reportedly believed that mocking stereotypes would help remove their sting.

Whatever his goal, the group took off among gay men and the disco set, and YMCA became a camp classic.

Was YMCA intended to be heard as gay?

Some controversy exists, but band members make it clear the answer is yes. Here’s what two of them said to Spin Magazine in 2008:

Randy Jones (cowboy): “When I moved to New York in 1975, I joined the McBurney YMCA on 23rd Street. I took Jacques [Morali] there three or four times in 1977, and he loved it. He was fascinated by a place where a person could work out with weights, play basketball, swim, take classes, and get a room. Plus, with Jacques being gay, I had a lot of friends I worked out with who were in the adult-film industry, and he was impressed by meeting people he had seen in the videos and magazines. Those visits with me planted a seed in him, and that’s how he got the idea for “Y.M.C.A.””

David Hodo (construction worker): “We had finished our third album Cruisin’, and we needed one more song as a filler. Jacques wrote “Y.M.C.A.” in about 20 minutes — the melody, the chorus, the outline. Then he gave it to Victor Willis and said, ‘Fill in the rest’ … ‘Y.M.C.A.’ certainly has a gay origin. That’s what Jacques was thinking when he wrote it, because our first album was possibly the gayest album ever. I mean, look at us. We were a gay group. So was the song written to celebrate gay men at the YMCA? Yes. Absolutely. And gay people love it.”

When I moved to Manhattan in 1990, the very first place I stayed was the McBurney YMCA on 23rd Street. Rooms were cheap, the vibe was gay as hell, and communal showers on each floor didn’t seem like such a terrible idea.

I was broke, didn’t know anybody, and worried I would have to slink home with my tail between my legs. But by God, I was in New York, and I was gonna LIVE for whatever amount of time I could manage.

I didn’t yet know two important facts: Chelsea, the gym’s neighborhood, was growing gayer by the day, and the McBurney Y was that YMCA. I knew all the campy hand motions to the song, but I didn’t have the foggiest notion I was sleeping in the place it all started.

Oh, make that THREE things I didn’t know: I had no idea that YMCA was a Mafia hangout.

Fast forward a year …

I’m in my twenties, and in my head I’m a fierce, unfuckwithable queer street activist. My belly boils with righteous fire, and I have a network of activist buddies who seem to eat cops for breakfast and homophobes for lunch. I strut around the streets of Chelsea and Greenwich Village dressed in black, covered in pink triangles and pins that scream “Silence = Death!”

But I don’t strut in other parts of the gay world. I have a boyfriend I live with and love. He thinks I’m hot, or at least he tells me he does, but I don’t believe him.

I’m short, I’m skinny, I’m pale. I look like a bookkeeper or an intelligence analyst, which is exactly what I had been before landing in the Big Apple. I’m getting too old to be a twink, and I dread turning into a nebbish, my boyfriend Lenny’s Yiddish slang for people who look … like me.

Like a nerd.

So when I’m not out doing fierce street theater, risking arrest shouting “Whose streets? Our streets!” I’m pretty shy around my peers. I doubt anyone finds me attractive, because I don’t find me attractive.

The Chelsea Gym is just around the corner from where I live, and my boyfriend Lenny tells me to stop whining and drag my neurotic ass over there. “Go lift some weights, bubbeleh,” he insists. “I love you just the way you are, but if you don’t love you, go work out with all the silly gym queens.”

Only I can’t!

I walk in with a friend one afternoon, and take a tour, but I leave KNOWING I’ll never step foot inside again. All those pecs! Abs! Biceps! Sculpted bodies! Mary Louise, but I would never dare strip down and put on a muscle shirt in there. I’d DIE first.

Then it hits me.

The McBurney has a gym! It’s just a block and a half from home, and I walk past it to GET home from work every day.

I still have zero clue about the mobsters, but I like how the facilities are nice and the place isn’t packed. I like that the staff is pretty gay, but stuck-up gym queens are scarce.

So, I pays my money, and I starts me a routine. Three or four days a week, I lift weights for about an hour. I don’t know anybody, and I keep to myself, but I enjoy it and make progress.

Even if I still don’t want anybody seeing my body!

That cute blond in the corner is stunning. His body is beautiful, and his smile is exquisite. He always uses the same locker, and I make sure I choose one near his. I note his schedule and try to keep my own close.

I don’t dare speak to him. He’s too gorgeous, too perfect, too unapproachable. All I know, as he puts his Calvin’s back on after a shower, is he glows with ethereal perfection I can only describe as angelic, even though his aura is totally masculine.

His underwear choice tells me he’s gay, as does something imperceptible about how he carries himself.

“Hey,” he says, “I’m Matt,” sticking out his hand.

My mouth falls open, and I stutter as I pull a tee shirt out of my bag.

“Hey, I just wanted to say …” he starts, and I can see him eyeing the bare skin of my chest. “I mean, don’t take this wrong, I’m not some stalker, but you’ve really gotten in shape. You look great. I don’t see a lot of guys tough it out the way you have. ”

Matt introduced me to the McBurney steamroom and sauna scene. “Hey, he said one day, “I get here really early Saturday mornings before anybody else. Perfect time to get some steam when nobody’s around. You know?”

I didn’t know, but I found out fast. Don’t judge. Lenny and I weren’t sexually exclusive. Our only rules were ‘always play safe’ and ‘keep no secrets.’

After Matt initiated me the next Saturday morning, the heavy cruising scene popped to life for me. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. The steam room and sauna were almost always full of gay men looking for a casual hookup.

They were also full of middle-aged Italian American men who didn’t look or act gay at all. But I still didn’t have that part figured out, and I didn’t realize angelic Matt held the key to it all.

The mystery started coming together one afternoon in the cramped elevator up to the locker room.

I was stripping off my blazer and tie, listening to two older men talk. “God damn faggots,” one of them said to the other. “Swimming laps in the damn pool like fuckin’ normal people. Makes me sick. Mother fuckers should know better than spreadin’ mother fuckin’ AIDS like that.”

I went off!

AIDS stigma then was huge, and ignorant discrimination pervasive. At Act Up, we were used to fighting nonsense. I puffed up into full street activist fury. I cussed both men out, then hightailed it down to the lobby and dragged an employee up to the locker room.

“I demand you revoke the membership of BOTH these men — tonight. If you refuse, I’ll have hundreds of activists marching outside and stopping people from coming in. All I need to do is make one phone call.”

Did I mention the McBurney YMCA was a Mafia hangout?

The (very gay) facilities manager didn’t tell me, not even when he sat me down for a chat the next day in his office. “Don’t you understand?” he sighed. “We’re trying to educate people, help them learn to get along with us. You shrill (yes, he said shrill) activist types aren’t helping. I need to ask you to please drop your complaint. Trust me to handle things?”

My face must have turned bright red. It felt hot enough to be made of lava instead of skin. “Hell, no! Trust some Uncle Tom like you? Don’t your DARE ask me to drop my complaint! You WILL act on it or I WILL have hundreds of people outside your front doors protesting. And I WILL see you written up in Outweek. Count on it!”

I was bluffing. I had no power to summon Act Up and no influence with Michelangelo Signorile, who wrote for the weekly activist rag I’d mentioned. But the manager backed down, and he did revoke the membership of the men in the elevator.

May I call the mobster in the steam room Vinny? The name is stereotypical, but his real name is just as over-used.

After he slapped me, he smiled again. “We all gotta get along here. Next time you got a problem, you come to me, huh? I’ll fix it. Just because them damn Village People wrote that stupid song don’t mean you own this place.”

He threw his arm over my sweaty shoulder and walked me out. I had no idea what was happening until I saw Matt. “Uncle Vinny!” he said. “I see you met Jim.”

They dragged me across the street for drinks at a tapas place, me so confused I couldn’t focus.

They laid it on the line. Matt really was Vinnie’s nephew. Vinnie really was a mobster. The McBurney YMCA really was a Chelsea hangout, and that meant the whole neighborhood was invited.

Matt groped my knee under the table as Vinnie poured out sangria into chilled glasses. “Welcome to New York, kid,” he said. “Just watch your fuckin’ manners.”

And I did. When I started seeing those two men from the elevator around the gym again, I didn’t say a word. And they never once looked at me, not as far as I could see.

Did I do the right thing insisting their membership be stripped? Did I do the right thing pretending I didn’t notice they’d come back? I don’t know. But they never spouted gay slurs in the elevator again, not so far as I ever heard.

And I never went down on Matt in the steam room again! Somehow his ethereal glow didn’t quite rev me up the way it had before.

But I never stopped working out at that YMCA, not until the day I left New York City for good. After all, it was there for all of us — gay, straight, mobbed up, whatever. But when I do those hand motions to that famous song? Think gay Matt and his straight uncle Vinnie don’t flash though my mind?

Of course they do! As do thoughts about how activism and love of neighbor must sometimes work together. Even if I still don’t have it all figured out.

James Finn is a long-time LGBTQ activist, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, an essayist occasionally published in queer news outlets, and an “agented” novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected].

¹ Y.M.C.A. lyrics © Harlem Music. Songwriters: Henri Belolo / Jacques Morali / Victor Edward Willis