Bowen Yang opens up about ‘healing’ after his parents put him in conversion therapy
Bowen Yang is revisiting a “painful” part of his adolescent years.
In a preview clip for the April 13 episode of “Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist,” Yang, who is one of a few openly LGBTQ+ cast members in the 50-year history of “Saturday Night Live,” recalled what it was like to go to gay conversion therapy as a teenager.
When Geist asked him how he worked through that “difficult” time in his life, Yang replied, “I didn’t really get to work through it.”
“I think I probably wasn’t brave enough back then to express that or to package it in a way that they could understand,” he said, referring to his parents. “Because it felt completely foreign to them and it was completely foreign to them. I ‘came out,’ quote, unquote, in the sense that my parents just sort of stumbled upon something.”
In an interview with The New York Times, Yang explained that he “came out” to his parents when he was 17 and his parents discovered him having “lewd conversations” with someone on AOL Instant Messenger.
Due to the way his parents learned about his sexuality, Yang told Geist they had a hard time dealing with the news.
“They were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t realize this is what we were dealing with. Where we come from, this doesn’t happen.’ That was sort of their concept of it. And so I give them a lot of grace for that because they just have no context for it. And so we went to conversion therapy,” he said.
Yang explained that his parents gave him an ultimatum. Either he does the conversion therapy and could attend school with his sister at New York University or he stays at home in Denver and attends a local college there.
Though the latter didn’t seem that bad, Yang explained that the only choice for him was to go to the Big Apple.
“I just knew I had to live there,” he said. “And so I kind of played along and I kind of just humored them and myself into seeing what it was. And not knowing that it was ultimately very painful and detrimental and there was a lot of healing that happened after that.”
Part of that healing included Yang’s journey to find himself.
“Identity is this really fickle thing. It’s not something that you arrive at until much later in life I think,” the 34-year-old shared. “Like, I think I didn’t really get a grasp on who I was until two years ago.”
According to Human Rights Campaign, conversion therapy is “a range of dangerous and discredited practices that falsely claim to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
The site states that this type of therapy can “lead to depression, anxiety, drug use, homelessness, and suicide.”
The practice has since been banned for minors in 19 states, including Colorado, where Yang was subjected to the treatment.
Though Yang endured a lot in his childhood, he told People in 2021 that he is now in a “healthy place” with his parents.
“There has been a nice shift where they go, ‘Great job,’” he said of how they’ve been handling his fame.
If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide please call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
