Paul McCartney reveals John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono thought Lennon ‘might have been gay’
Paul McCartney addressed John Lennon’s sexuality in a 2015 interview. (Getty)
Sir Paul McCartney has revealed that Yoko Ono, the widow of his The Beatles bandmate John Lennon, once told him that she thought Lennon “might have been gay”.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, conducted in 2015 and published last week to coincide with Man on the Run, a documentary about McCartney’s life post-Beatles, the 83-year-old musician explained how Yoko Ono had shared her theory with him.
“She’s an artist. She’s kooky,” McCartney said when the conversation turned to Ono.
“But John loved her, and that’s the bottom line. You really can’t go beyond that, no matter what you might think. Not my type, but I swear she rang me shortly after John died and said, ‘You know, I think John might have been gay.’”
Despite Ono’s inkling, Paul McCartney wasn’t too convinced.
“I went, ‘I’m not sure.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. Certainly not when I knew him.’ Because we’d been in the ’60s. We’d been around with loads and loads of girls. And I bumped into seeing him jacking… a lot of girl action,” he shared.
“And I’d slept with John very often, but there was never anything. There was never a gesture, never an expression. It was nothing. So I had no reason to believe this at all.”
Despite his hesitation to believe Ono’s theory, McCartney admitted that he had heard rumours about John Lennon’s sexuality. His relationship with The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, who was gay, was subject to speculation and became the premise of the 1992 film The Hours and Times, about a real-life trip the pair took to Spain.
“I saw that as a power play, which was very John,” McCartney said of the holiday to Spain.
“Brian would ask him as a homosexual thing – a good-looking boy who Brian fancied. They went down to Spain, had a fun time. No doubt John would play into the thing,” he said.
“I personally didn’t think anything had happened. Certainly never heard about anything happening. But I saw it as: ‘You want to deal with the Beatles? I’m the leader.’”
Lennon spoke about the holiday himself in 1963, explaining that he and Epstein had an “intense” relationship.
“I was on holiday with Brian Epstein in Spain, where the rumours went around that he and I were having a love affair. Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated,” he said, adding: “But it was a pretty intense relationship.”
In 2015, Ono spoke to Daily Beast about Lennon’s sexuality, after she was honoured with the Icon Award by LGBTQ+ magazine Attitude.
She laughed as she recalled that Lennon “thought it was good” that people believed him and Ono to be either gay or bisexual.
Ono went on to say that she didn’t believe Lennon had slept with other men, but thought “he had a desire to” but “was too inhibited”.
“No, not inhibited,” she countered. “He said, ‘I don’t mind if there’s an incredibly attractive guy.’ It’s very difficult: They would have to be not just physically attractive, but mentally very advanced too. And you can’t find people like that.’”
She added: “The beginning of the year he was killed, he said to me, ‘I could have done it, but I can’t because I just never found somebody that was that attractive.’ Both John and I were into attractiveness – you know – beauty.”
John Lennon and Yoko Ono met in 1966 and got married in 1969, and remained so until Lennon’s death in 1980. He was shot and killed outside of his home in Manhattan by Mark David Chapman.
Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
