Yoko Ono ‘believed John Lennon might have been gay’, Paul McCartney reveals

Yoko Ono once told Sir Paul McCartney that she believed her late husband John Lennon “might have been gay”, the former Beatle has confirmed in a newly resurfaced interview.

The comments resurfaced this week after Vanity Fair published, in full, a 2015 interview with McCartney to coincide with the release of Man on the Run, a documentary exploring his post-Beatles life. In the interview, McCartney recalls receiving a phone call from Ono shortly after Lennon was murdered in 1980, during which she voiced long‑held suspicions about her husband’s sexuality.

“I swear [Ono] rang me shortly after John died and said, ‘You know, I think John might have been gay,’” McCartney recounted. He said he gently disagreed, insisting he had never seen anything to suggest Lennon was anything other than straight. “‘I’m not sure,’” he remembered replying. “‘Certainly not when I knew him… we’d been in the ’60s. We’d been around with loads and loads of girls. And I bumped into seeing him getting… a lot of girl action.’” 

McCartney added that despite their close friendship - including the revelation that the two men had slept in the same bed on multiple occasions - Lennon never showed any romantic or sexual interest in him. “There was never a gesture, never an expression. It was nothing. So I had no reason to believe this at all.”

Rumours around Lennon’s sexuality have circulated for decades, often tied to his long‑speculated‑upon relationship with Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ gay manager. Lennon and Epstein took a now‑mythologised trip to Spain in 1963. McCartney suggested the holiday was more about power dynamics than romance, describing it as “a power play” typical of Lennon. He said he never believed anything sexual happened between the pair. 

Ono - who married Lennon in 1969 and remained with him until his death - has spoken before about her husband’s possible attraction to men. In a 2015 interview with The Daily Beast, she suggested Lennon had a desire to be intimate with men but felt too inhibited to act on it, adding: “All of us must be bisexual.”

McCartney said he believed Ono’s comments had been shaped by profound grief. Comparing her remarks to thoughts he had after the death of his own wife, Linda, he said: “That’s grief. That’s just what you do. You’re dealing with it.”

Despite their famously complicated relationship, McCartney stressed that Lennon’s love for Ono was unquestionable and that her perspective, however unexpected, remained part of the broader and often mythologised story of Lennon’s life.