Reading Time: 3 minutes
This gives new meaning to “Hide Your Love Away”!
John Lennon and Paul McCartney might be the most beloved and influential songwriting duo in history.
But the relationship between the Beatles’ frontmen was tense at times — and now we know it may have been even more complex than we realized.
In a newly resurfaced interview, McCartney revealed that Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, believed he might have been gay.
“I swear [Ono] rang me shortly after John died and said, ‘You know, I think John might have been gay,’” McCartney told Vanity Fair (via Page Six).
“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,” McCartney recalled replying.
“We’d been around with loads and loads of girls. And I bumped into seeing him jacking … a lot of girl action.
“There was never a gesture, never an expression. It was nothing. So I had no reason to believe this at all.”
McCartney says that Ono’s suspicions may have arisen from trips that Lennon took with the Beatles’ gay manager, Brian Epstein.
“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. No doubt John would play into the thing.
“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 and Ono’s relationship famously had quite a few ups and downs, including the period between 1973 and 1974, when they separated and Lennon embarked on what he called his “Lost Weekend” in Los Angeles.
Lennon spent the year boozing and carousing with pal Harry Nilsson, and his marriage almost came to an end.
“There was a time when Sir Paul McCartney offered Yoko his willingness to speak to John in Los Angeles about the separation,” the couple’s pal, Elliot Mintz remarked in 2024.
“She seemed grateful for that invitation,” he continued, adding:
“Paul came out here, he had a meeting with John. His advice to him was, ‘You can’t just say that you’ve changed. You have to show it. You have to prove it. It would be like dating her again. You have to bring her flowers, you have to take her out for dinners. You have to show her how important she is to you in your world.’”
Lennon was a famously open-minded and free-spirited man, so it’s not hard to see why his widow believes he might have been open for anything.
But whatever the case, John and Yoko remained married for the rest of his life.
