Lennon got to hide his love away

MANILA, Philippines - “I think he had a desire to (have sex with men), but I think he was too inhibited,” Yoko Ono admitted John Lennon’s suppressed sexuality in a revealing interview with The Daily Beast last Oct. 14.

Ono quotes Lennon in this interview: “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.”

As a Quarry Man, the drunken Lennon got attracted to Paul McCartney for his resemblance to his American idol Elvis Presley and ability to imitate his singing voice.

At the Casbah, the Beatles front acted for the openly gay Little Richard whom Lennon worshipped like a hero.

This eventually led into his bromance with McCartney whose existence is widely accepted and could be proven by the fact of mutual affection that they always shared a room during their tour days.

Lennon once admitted having had an “intense relationship” with Brian Epstein which was “never consummated.” Epstein who gave the moptops the androgynous look was the gay business manager who signed up the Beatles as contract performer because of his attraction to Lennon.

Lennon wrote with McCartney You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, a song about Epstein who made a pass at him while the two of them vacationed in Spain. It now appears that Lennon also sublimated his own same-gender love as a Beatle.

There are photos of gay pop artist Andy Warhol buzzing, embracing and groping Lennon (and vice-versa) in the presence of Ono during the New York years.

All these are telltale signs of Lennon’s latent homosexuality that likely originated when his father, Alfred, abandoned him as a boy and his mother, Julia, so that his entire life he sought a replacement. His widely acknowledged father figures shifted from Presley to Bob Dylan to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Ono. Although female, Ono acted as a father figure to him.

When it became apparent to McCartney that Lennon had found Ono as his artistic collaborator, he started to dispense with this bromance eventually leading to the break-up of the Beatles.

Neither accident nor coincidence, McCartney married Linda Eastman on March 12, 1969, Lennon had a rush wedding with Ono on March 20, 1969. This marked the bromance’s “break-up.” Each of them had found a woman to love and the bromance and the Beatles had to suffer. What followed between them, the acrimonious years that started from 1968 up to 1974, was an “ex-lovers’ quarrel.”

Did Lennon engage in homosexual act? Ono believes he did not do same-sex intimacy due more to the social system’s restrictions than to Lennon’s sexuality.

“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,” Ono summed up the issue of Lennon’s homoerotic life.