John Lennon desired sex with other men, but was “too inhibited” to go ahead with it, according to Yoko Ono, in a new interview with The Daily Beast.
It has long been suggested that Lennon had sex with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein – the 1991 film The Hours and the Times speculated on what might have happened when the pair took a trip to Barcelona – but Ono said she didn’t believe that to be the case.
“Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship,” she said. “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.”
She said, though, that Lennon “just didn’t want to do it”.
Lennon never had sex with a man because he would have had to be both physically attractive and “mentally very advanced, too. And you can’t find people like that,” Ono said.
In the interview, Ono also spoke about her opposition to Mark Chapman, who murdered Lennon in December 1980, being granted parole. He has applied eight times, unsuccessfully. “One thing I think is that he did it once, he could do it again, to somebody else,” she said. “It could be me, it could be [her and Lennon’s son] Sean, it could be anybody, so there is that concern.”
