The actor sat down with podcast host Willie Geist to chat about his career and going to conversion therapy as a teen…
When Bowen Yang was a teenager, his parents presented an ultimatum that led to “painful and detrimental” consequences for the Saturday Night Live (SNL) star.
In a conversation with Willie Geist for the podcast Sunday Sitdown, Yang discusses how his journey to New York City was only possible if he agreed to attend conversion therapy. “Either you take conversion therapy and go to NYU or you don’t and you stay and live with us [his parents] and you go to school in Denver,” the comedian revealed about the ultimatum.
As Yang was coming to terms with his sexuality, the situation caused conflict within his family. The actor shares the confrontation he had with his parents after they stumbled upon an open chat window that outed him. He recalls their confusion about how to handle the situation, saying it was a completely foreign concept to them. “I give them a lot of grace for that because they just had no context for it.”
While he admits staying in Denver would have also been a great option, New York was calling him. To follow his dream, he agreed to go conversion therapy. “I kind of played along…and humoured them and myself into seeing what it was.”
After the experience, Yang ventured on a healing process for years and struggled to understand his identity saying it “is this really fickle thing, it’s not something that you arrive at until much later in life.” He tells Geist he only grasped who he was about two years ago as he went back and forth between filming Wicked and being on SNL. “I was so burnt out that I had to really come to grips with who I was and I had to face myself… I feel like that’s a beautiful human journey we get to go on if we’re lucky.”
In the end, Yang went to NYU and met his La Culturista co-host Matt Rogers. He would go on to become the first Chinese American and only openly gay cast member on SNL making his debut in 2018. He is also in a good place with his parents now.
He admits that if one thing had happened differently his dreams may not have become a reality. “I understand how delicate things are now. How circumstances are so fragile. Had I moved back home or if I didn’t come to school in New York…Things would have ended up so differently.”
In January 2022, the Canadian government introduced a ban on conversion therapy through Bill C-4. While banned, local organizations stress that the practice can operate under disguise and to be aware of the signs. In 2023, The Trevor Project found there were over 1,300 conversion therapy practitioners in the United States.
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