The Beatles are probably the most written about band of all time, with literally thousands of biographies written about 'The Fab Four' who changed the face of popular music forever.
But legendary singer songwriter Paul McCartney shared a recollection in an interview that was published last week that could change how Beatles fans understand the band's other lead vocalist, John Lennon.
The interview with Vanity Fair was recorded in 2015 but released recently to mark a new documentary, Man on the Run, which follows McCartney's life after leaving the most famous and influential music group of all time.
McCartney told the publication that artist Yoko Ono, Lennon's wife from 1969 until his tragic death in 1980, had once told him that she thought he 'might have been gay,' which supports a claim often made about the Beatle who was shot dead in New York.
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He said: "I swear she rang me shortly after John died and said, 'You know, I think John might have been gay.'"
But even if Ono thought so, McCartney, who knew Lennon from the age of 16 and had become a man with him, doesn't seem to think so.
He added: "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. We'd been around with loads and loads of girls. And I bumped into seeing him jacking… a lot of girl action.
"And I'd slept with John very often, but there was never anything. There was never a gesture, never an expression. It was nothing. So I had no reason to believe this at all."
For years McCartney has gone to great lengths to deny the rumor that Lennon may have also had sex with men, as his proclivity for practicing free love with women was well known within the band.
Since the 1980s, he has fended off claims in a number of lurid biographies that said Lennon had at one point had a sexual relationship with their manager Brian Epstein.
These stem from a trip to Spain in 1963, the year Beatlemania started to take hold, when Lennon joined Epstein on a trip to Spain. Something McCartney has explained previously as being about 'power'.
"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."
McCartney has maintained this for years, even writing in The Beatles Anthology, which was essentially the band telling its own story, that he would have known if his friend and bandmate was attracted to men. He said: "That was the intimacy we had. We would always be walking in on each other and things.
"I’d walked in on John and seen a little bottom bobbing up and down with a girl underneath him. It was perfectly normal: you’d go, ‘Oh shit, sorry,’ and back out the room..."
"That’s why I’ve always found very strange the theory that John was gay. Because over fifteen years of sharing rooms, sharing our lives, not one of us has an incident to relate of catching John with a boy."
Topics: Music
William Morgan