Was John Lennon gay? A phone call from Yoko Ono after his death prompted Paul McCartney to speak out

Shortly after John Lennon’s death, his wife, Yoko Ono, told bandmate Paul McCartney that she suspected her husband might have been gay. McCartney told Vanity Fair in a 2015 interview released in full on Friday, coinciding with the premiere of Man on the Run, a new documentary about his life after The Beatles. McCartney discussed the “rumors” around his bandmate’s sexuality, plus other hot-button topics about their time as The Beatles, in an interview with Joe Hagan.

“I’d slept with John very often, but there was never anything,” McCarthy said. He explained that Ono once expressed concerns about whether Lennon may be gay. “She rang me shortly after John died and said, ‘You know, I think John might have been gay,’” McCartney said of Ono’s call. Ono made a similar claim in a 2015 interview with the Daily Beast.

Lennon was killed outside his New York City apartment in December 1980. McCartney said he doubted Ono’s account and believed it may have been an expression of grief rather than a statement of fact. He acknowledged, however, that questions about Lennon’s sexuality had circulated before, centered largely on Lennon’s relationship with the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, who was gay.

McCartney recalled a 1963 trip Epstein and Lennon took together to Spain. “Brian would ask him [on vacation] as a homosexual thing. A good-looking boy, who Brian fancied,” McCartney said. “They went down to Spain, had a fun time. No doubt John would play into anything. I personally didn’t think anything had happened. Certainly never heard about anything happening.”

From left, Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Paul McCartney attend a film opening in London in 1968.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

McCartney said that during their years together in the 1960s, he and Lennon spent time with many women, and that nothing in Lennon’s behavior ever raised questions in his mind. “There was never anything,” McCartney 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 surfaced periodically for decades. 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 assertion was never substantiated and was widely disputed.

The Vanity Fair interview was conducted by Hagan for his biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Sticky Fingers.

This article was written as part of the Future of Queer Media fellowship program at The Advocate, which is underwritten by a generous gift from Morrison Media Group. The program helps support the next generation of LGBTQ+ journalists