Saturday Night Live star and comedian Bowen Yang is opening up about a very personal chapter of his life — his time as a teenager who attended gay conversion therapy.
The 34 year old actor spoke to Willie Geist for Sunday TODAY on his parents sending him to conversion therapy when he was a teen. And then there was the decision made with an ultimatum: go to therapy or attend college at NYU with his sister.
“I’m just kidding, but those poor people did not realize it’s one of the gayest schools in the country,” Yang joked with some levity. “I knew I had to live there.”
But Yang said he “humored” the experience at first, and he revealed the emotional toll it took on him. He explained,
“I kind of just played along… I didn’t know it would be very painful and detrimental in the end.” “A lot of healing happened after that.”
The reason Yang has long since been open about his identity and the difficulties he has faced comes through in his explanation that his parents—Meng and Ruilin—weren’t trying to hurt him. “They had told him where they came from, this doesn’t happen.”
Their reaction was not cruel, he said, it was just confused. Yang said, “I give them a lot of grace.” “They simply had no context for it.” “They were completely foreign to them.”
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The Wicked actor also told how he was still on his internal journey when his parents first found out. He said: “I really didn’t get to work through it before they found out.” “I didn’t dare express that to the extent that they could understand it at the time, probably.”
Yang is now a beloved voice in comedy and representation for the LGBTQ+ community, and his story is one of empathy, healing, and opportunity for honest discussion.