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Yoko Ono Says John Lennon Wanted to Be Bisexual, He Just Never Found a Guy That Did It For Him

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | October 14, 2015 |

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | October 14, 2015 |



Did you know Yoko Ono still lives in the same apartment she and John Lennon lived in together? The same home where they did their love-ins, the same building Lennon was shot in front of? She still lives there, 35 years later. Does that seem totally bonkers to anyone else? I suppose, though, that you can’t have a Yoko Ono interview without some majorly crazy factoids. Like this one, revealed in the same Daily Beast interview, where Ono says she and John Lennon kinda (maybe more than kinda) wished they had been bisexual.

John and I had a big talk about it, saying, basically, all of us must be bisexual. And we were sort of in a situation of thinking that we’re not [bisexual] because of society. So we are hiding the other side of ourselves, which is less acceptable. But I don’t have a strong sexual desire towards another woman… I mean, both John and I thought it was good that people think we were bisexual, or homosexual.

They thought it was good! They wanted to be that open and cool! They just, maybe… weren’t. Of course, for much of Lennon’s career, there were rumors about his relationship with The Beatles’ openly gay manager, Brian Epstein. Lennon himself said, “Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.”

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But Lennon did also say after an infamous trip to Spain, that it WAS consummated. Now, according to Yoko, that may have been a fib.

Uh, well, the story I was told was a very explicit story, and from that I think they didn’t have it [sex]. But they went to Spain, and when they came back, tons of reporters were asking, ‘Did you do it, did you do it?’ So he said, ‘I did it.’ Isn’t that amazing? But of course he would say that. I’m sure Brian Epstein made a move, yeah.

So why didn’t John go for it?

I think he had a desire to, but I think he was too inhibited. No, not inhibited. He said, ‘I don’t mind if there’s an incredibly attractive guy.’ It’s very difficult: They would have to be not just physically attractive, but mentally very advanced too. And you can’t find people like that.

I understand wanting to be more hip and cool and progressive than you may actually be as a person. (I went to art school— that’s a feeling I get.) And I get that Lennon and Ono may have felt bisexuality was those things. But to say he never met a man who was hot AND smart? That seems nutso to me. I mean, the man shared the stage with Paul McCartney and George Harrison! (And Ringo too, yes, sure.) He was living in New York in the ’60s! I have trouble believing that he couldn’t have met a guy that struck his fancy if that’s what he was open to and looking for. But Ono says it never happened.

“No, I don’t think so. The beginning of the year he was killed, he said to me, ‘I could have done it, but I can’t because I just never found somebody that was that attractive.’ Both John and I were into attractiveness—you know—beauty.