Was John Lennon Gay? Yoko Ono Thought So…
A 2015 Vanity Fair interview with Paul McCartney, released in full last week, has reignited one of rock music’s most persistent questions: was John Lennon attracted to men?
McCartney, now 83, told journalist Joe Hagan that Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow, rang him shortly after Lennon’s murder in December 1980. Her message was blunt. “I swear she rang me shortly after John died and said, ‘You know, I think John might have been gay,'” he recalled.
What McCartney actually said
McCartney wasn’t convinced. Having toured and lived closely with Lennon throughout the 1960s, he said he never saw any sign of same-sex attraction. “I’d slept with John very often, but there was never anything. There was never a gesture, never an expression. It was nothing.”
He suggested grief may have shaped Ono’s thinking. Comparing her remarks to thoughts he had after losing his own wife, Linda, McCartney said: “That’s grief. That’s just what you do.”
The interview was released to coincide with Man On The Run, a new documentary about McCartney’s post-Beatles life.
The Brian Epstein question
McCartney acknowledged that rumours about Lennon’s sexuality had circulated for decades, mostly tied to a 1963 trip Lennon took to Spain with The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, who was gay. He was sceptical of any romantic reading of that holiday. “I saw that as a power play, which was very John,” he said. “I personally didn’t think anything had happened. Certainly never heard about anything happening.”
Lennon himself addressed the trip that same year, saying the relationship with Epstein was “almost like a love affair, but it was never consummated.”
That trip later became the basis for the 1992 film The Hours and Times, a fictionalised account of what may or may not have happened between the two men.
What Ono has said before
This isn’t the first time Ono has spoken about her late husband’s sexuality. In 2015, when accepting the Icon Award from LGBTQIA+ magazine Attitude, she told the Daily Beast that Lennon “had a desire” to be with men but was too inhibited to act on it. She recalled his own words on the subject.
According to Ono, Lennon said: “I could have done it, but I can’t because I just never found somebody that was that attractive.” His standards, apparently, were high. “He would have had to be not only physically attractive, but also mentally very interesting,” she explained.
Ono also recalled a conversation the two had about sexuality more broadly: “John and I had a big talk about it, saying, basically, all of us must be bisexual.”
At DNA, we’re not here to put a label on someone who isn’t around to speak for himself. But these are his wife’s words, and his own, and they’re worth noting.
