Cynthia was not the only one who loved John deeply and was hopeful of intimacy with him. Brian Epstein felt pretty much the same way.
That the Beatles’ manager was gay was no big secret, though he somehow managed to convince himself that it was.
The big secret was no secret at all; the sister of Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ driver/roadie/assistant, heard about it from a friend and told her brother, who (of course) already knew. Neil told John that his sister knew. And one night John, high as a kite, let it slip to Brian that Neil knew he was queer. Brian “indignantly stormed out,” according to his colleague Peter Brown, and confronted Aspinall.
“Why did you tell them I’m queer?” he demanded to know. “It’s a lie!”
“You are queer,” Neil matter-of-factly responded.
“I am not!”
“Are too!”
Brown wrote that the other Beatles, knowing Brian was gay, didn’t mind at all. “We were more confused by it than turned off,” he quoted Paul as saying. But that didn’t stop them from seizing on it as an opportunity to make fun of Brian behind his back. They rechristened his autobiography A Cellarful of Noise, calling it A Cellarful of Boys – and had an alternate line for “Baby, you’re a rich man, too” - “Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew”.
Brian’s intense denial wasn’t just a case of kidding himself; it was a default position in Britain, where homosexuality was still regarded as criminal. This was, after all, the country that had mercilessly crucified its own savior, Alan Turing – world-class codebreaker, winner of World War II, inventor of the digital computer – by chemically neutering him and driving him to suicide. Brian could not imagine that his homosexuality was obvious to the most casual observer; but even if he could, he dared not let any such rumor proliferate.
The Beatles not only knew he was gay; they were very clear that he was in love with John. Most of the Beatles entourage were very clear on it.
“[John] was the light of Brian’s life and in some small way the impetus for almost everything that Brian did for the Beatles,” wrote Brown.
Bob Spitz quoted Brown: “John wasn’t a pretty boy, he had a good look, and a general fuck-you attitude, which was a turn on. Once Brian saw John, there was no turning away.”
“He was dazzled by John, by his looks, by his wit, even by his cruelty,” Brown wrote. “When John spoke, Brian looked away, not daring to gaze directly into his eyes lest his lovesick look expose what he thought was his secret. John was sardonically amused at the power he had over Brian and didn’t hesitate to use it to be manipulative or mean. This, in turn, fueled Brian’s masochism and made him desire John even more.”
John, for his part, wasn’t trying to lead Brian on, but he did spend more time with him than the others did – not out of affection or physical attraction, but in order to secure his position as the band’s leader. This included accompanying Brian to underground gay clubs, where John would observe from the sidelines with amusement, but would not join in. This had to be an encouragement to Brian that his desire for John was not in vain.
He made a standing offer to John to take him to Copenhagen for the weekend, anytime John felt like getting out of town.
In 1988, Albert Goldman asserted in his Lennon biography, The Lives of John Lennon, very controversially, that Brian eventually succeeded.
“He and Brian had sex,” he wrote. “Naturally John was not eager to avow this fact or to explain his motive, but when challenged by Pete Shotton, John came up with an explanation that echoed the line he had taken up with Cynthia: ‘Eppy just kept on and on at me, until one night I just pulled me trousers down and said to him: ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Brian, just stick it up me fucking arse, then.’ And he said to me, ‘Actually, John, I don’t do that kind of thing. That’s not what I like to do. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what is it you like to do, then?’ And he said, ‘I’d really just like to touch you, John.’ And so I let him toss me off.”
Goldman was eviscerated by the rock press and Beatles fans all over the world for making such a heretical assertion. Bono of U2 even denounced Goldman in a U2 song - “God, Part II”, written as a sequel to John’s own song “God”: Don’t believe in Goldman / His type like a curse / Instant karma’s going to get him / If I don’t get him first. No one wanted to believe that John had actually had sex with Brian.21
The thing is, the quoted exchange really did come from Pete Shotton’s own memoir, John Lennon In My Life. And Pete was, of course, John’s oldest and best childhood friend, in whom he confided all his life.
And Shotton had his own Brian story to tell. In the early days of Brian’s management of the Beatles, he’d approached Pete in a club where he’d been drinking with John, who got up and left. Brian suggested they take a ride in Brian’s Mark 10 Jaguar, where he invited Pete to his apartment.
“What for?” Shotton asked.
“I think you know what for,” Brian replied, giving him a strange look.
“No, no, Brian,” Shotton replied. “That’s not my scene.”
“Oh, all right, then, Pete,” Brian said offhandedly. “No problem. I do hope I haven’t offended you.”
“No offense taken,” Shotton answered. “Actually, I take it as a compliment!”
The night Pete described that he and Goldman reported in their books occurred in April 1963 in Barcelona, Spain.22
As John’s confidante Pete Shotton’s report supported Goldman’s assertion, so did Peter Brown’s - and Brown had a similar place in Epstein’s life. His version:
“...back in their hotel suite, drunk and sleepy from the sweet Spanish wine, Brian and John undressed in silence. ‘It’s okay, Eppy,’ John said, and lay down on the bed. Brian would have liked to have hugged him, but he was afraid. Instead, John lay there, tentative and still, and Brian fulfilled the fantasies he was so sure would bring him contentment, only to awake the next morning as hollow as before.”
John referenced the whole thing circumspectly 17 years later, in a 1980 Playboy interview not long before his death:
"Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite,” he said. “It was never consummated... but we did have a pretty intense relationship."
Cynthia is on record stating that she believed that John’s relationship with Brian was always platonic. But neither she nor the other Beatles doubted Brian’s feelings.
“I’m sure Brian was in love with John,” Paul said in The Beatles Anthology. “We were all in love with John, but Brian was gay so that added an edge.”
What does any of this matter?
For a start, look at how completely pulled out of the present we are by this question of John and Brian (and have been, steadily, since the Sixties). If John or any other Beatle had been gay or bisexual – so what??? Today, we wouldn’t give this a second thought; endless are the bands that have emerged since the Beatles that have had LGBTQ members, and no one thinks twice. Even Judas Priest’s Rob Halford’s coming-out scarcely created a ripple; Styx bassist Chuck Panozzo’s HIV and subsequent AIDS awareness and gay rights campaigns are, today, an on-going inspiration.
So what if a Beatle had sex with a man?
We are pulled out of the present by this, and that serves to remind us just how far we’ve come. Queen Elizabeth apologized, on behalf of Britain, to the ghost of Alan Turing in 2013. The fact that we’ve come so far since the days when a Brian Epstein could live such a tortured life and a John Lennon could be so jaw-droppingly fossilized in the world’s pious expectations and an Albert Goldman could be so vehemently denounced just for quoting John and Brian’s closest friends, is a testimony to the fact that we’ve lived through a magnificent revolution in the intervening decades.
And who, exactly, gave us that revolution? Who, exactly, shattered every trope and cliché in pop culture about love and relationships? Who, exactly, showed us it’s okay to explore our sexuality honestly and express our insecurities?
Who, exactly, reminded us that all we need is love?
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