Paul McCartney says Yoko Ono called him shortly after John Lennon was killed in 1980 and told him she thought her husband might have been gay.
McCartney revealed the phone call in a 2015 interview with Vanity Fair that was published in full last week. The interview was released to coincide with the premiere of Man on the Run, a documentary about McCartney’s life after the Beatles broke up.
“I swear she rang me shortly after John died and said, ‘You know, I think John might have been gay,’” McCartney said.
He said he didn’t agree with her. McCartney said he and Lennon had spent years together touring and traveling, often sharing rooms, and that he had never seen anything to suggest Lennon was attracted to men. “I’d slept with John very often, but there was never anything,” he said. “There was never a gesture, never an expression. It was nothing.”
McCartney said he believed Ono’s remark was an expression of grief more than a statement of fact. He compared it to things he said himself after his wife Linda died. “That’s grief,” he said. “That’s just what you do.”
Ono Said the Same Thing a Decade Later
But Ono said something similar a decade later, in a separate interview, when she was no longer in the immediate aftermath of Lennon’s death. Speaking to the Daily Beast in 2015 while accepting an Icon Award from LGBTQ+ magazine Attitude, Ono said she and Lennon had talked extensively about bisexuality and agreed that most people have attractions they suppress because of social pressure.
She said Lennon told her he wouldn’t mind being with a man if the man were attractive enough — physically and intellectually. She said that in the year before he was killed, Lennon told her he simply hadn’t found anyone who met that standard.
The Spain TripBrian Epstein (Photo: Wikipedia)
Rumors about Lennon’s sexuality have circulated for decades. Most of them trace back to a trip he took to Spain in April 1963 with Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who was gay. The rest of the band went to the Canary Islands. Lennon, whose son Julian had been born three weeks earlier, went with Epstein instead.
Lennon talked about the trip publicly. He said he and Epstein would sit in a café in Torremolinos and he would ask Epstein which men he found attractive. He described their relationship as “almost a love affair, but not quite” and said it was never consummated.
His childhood friend Pete Shotton said Lennon told him privately that something did happen — that Epstein asked only to touch him and that Lennon allowed it. Shotton said neither of them made much of it. Beatles biographer Hunter Davies wrote in his 2006 memoir that Lennon told him he had a one-night stand with Epstein in Spain. Davies noted that Lennon tended to exaggerate and stopped short of treating the claim as verified.
At Paul McCartney’s 21st birthday party in June 1963, a local DJ named Bob Wooler joked about Lennon’s “honeymoon” with Epstein. Lennon beat him badly enough to give him a black eye and bruised ribs. Lennon later said of the outburst: “I must have been frightened of the fag in me to get so angry.”
McCartney said he believed the Spain trip was about power, not sex. He said Lennon recognized that Epstein was attracted to him and used that to his advantage to establish himself as the group’s leader. “John was a smart cookie,” McCartney said. “Brian was gay, and John saw his opportunity to impress upon Mr. Epstein who was the boss of the group.”
Other Accounts
Ono said Lennon was relaxed about questions regarding his sexuality. She said he sometimes told her he liked her partly because she looked like, as he put it, a bloke in drag. She said she called him a “closet fag” as a term of affection and that he never objected. She also said Lennon told her he thought it was a good thing when people assumed they were gay or bisexual.
In 2001 the Advocate reported on a book proposal by Pauline Sutcliffe, sister of early Beatles bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, that claimed Lennon and Sutcliffe had a sexual relationship. The claim was disputed and never substantiated.
Lennon was shot and killed outside his New York City apartment building on December 8, 1980. He was 40 years old.
You can read the Vanity Fair article here.
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