Sir Paul McCartney has revealed that Yoko Ono once told him she believed her husband John Lennon “might have been gay” — a claim the former Beatle said he did not agree with. The surprising conversation, according to McCartney, took place shortly after Lennon’s murder in December 1980.
Speaking in an interview with Vanity Fair, originally conducted in 2015 and republished last week to coincide with the documentary Man on the Run, McCartney recalled receiving a phone call from Ono during the immediate aftermath of Lennon’s death. “I swear she rang me shortly after John died and said, ‘You know, I think John might have been gay,'” McCartney said.
The 83-year-old musician said he responded with scepticism, insisting that his experience of Lennon — both as a bandmate and a close friend — never suggested this to him. “I went, ‘I’m not sure.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. Certainly not when I knew him,'” McCartney explained. “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.”
McCartney added that the two men had often shared beds while touring in the early days of The Beatles, something common among young musicians travelling with limited money. But he insisted there was never any indication of romantic interest between them. “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. So I had no reason to believe this at all.”
Speculation about Lennon’s sexuality has circulated for decades, partly because of his friendship with Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who was openly gay within the band’s inner circle. The rumours intensified after Lennon and Epstein took a holiday together in Spain in 1963. However, McCartney said he personally never believed anything romantic occurred. “But I saw that as a power play, which was very John,” McCartney said. “Brian would ask him as a homosexual thing — a good-looking boy who Brian fancied. They went down to Spain, had a fun time.”
McCartney suggested that Ono’s comments to him shortly after Lennon’s death may have been shaped by grief. “When I lost Linda, I said some pretty crazy things,” he said, referring to his late wife Linda McCartney, who died in 1998. “I look back on them now and go, ‘That’s grief. That’s just what you do.'”
