Bowen Yang, the Saturday Night Live newcomer who has been shaking up the show with a crop of hilariously chaotic characters, has opened up about his former experience with gay conversation therapy.
In a New York Times profile by Maureen Dowd published this weekend, Yang explained that his parents first found out he was gay after discovering “lewd” conversations he’d had over AOL Instant Messenger when he was 17.
Yang joined the writing staff of SNL in 2018 and became a regular cast member the following year, making him the first Chinese American member and one of the only openly gay members in the show’s history.
Yang’s parents grew up in rural China and emigrated to Australia, where Bowen was born, and then later moved to Canada and the U.S. When they discovered he was gay, “They just sat me down and yelled at me and said, ‘We don’t understand this. Where we come from, this doesn’t happen,’” Yang told the Times. “This is the worst thing you can do as a child of immigrants. It’s just like you don’t want your parents to suffer this much over you.”
Yang recalls that shortly after, his father arranged for him to attend eight sessions with a “specialist in Colorado Springs” that ended up being gay conversion therapy.
“The first few sessions were talk therapy, which I liked, and then it veers off into this place of, ‘Let’s go through a sensory description of how you were feeling when you’ve been attracted to me,’” Yang explains. “And then the counselor would go through the circular reasoning thing of, ‘Well, weren’t you feeling uncomfortable a little bit when you saw that boy you liked?’ And I was like, ‘Not really.’ He goes, ‘How did your chest feel?’ And I was like, ‘Maybe I was slouching a little bit.’ And he goes, ‘See? That all stems from shame.’ It was just crazy. Explain the gay away with pseudoscience.”
There is now ample evidence that gay and transgender conversion therapy can cause severe medical and psychological harm. The American Psychiatric Association has stated that “the potential risks of reparative therapy are great, including depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior, since therapist alignment with societal prejudices against homosexuality may reinforce self-hatred already experienced by the patient.” 19 U.S. states have banned gay conversion therapy for minors, the most recent being Utah.
Yang explained that he and his family eventually met an understanding about his sexuality when he was attending NYU for undergrad. After coming out with them for a “second” time, Yang remembers “[getting] to this place of standing firm and being like, ‘This is sort of a fixed point, you guys.’” He continued, “Both my parents are doing a lot of work to just try to understand and I can’t rush them. I can’t resent them for not arriving at any place sooner than they’re able to get there.”
After the profile first appeared in the Times, many other sites aggregated the news, with ET Canada reporting that the relationship between Yang and his family “is strained.” Yang took to Instagram Stories to refute the framing. “Threw in about a dozen lil addenda about my relationship with my parents being loving and beautiful and nuanced that didn’t make the cut,” he wrote.
In another post, he clarified why the assumption was problematic. “There is a mildly cloying Western fascination with Asian family dynamics (which I get!) and modulating gayness onto that always lurches things into pure melodrama,” he wrote. “I promise it’s not as sad as I made it sound and things are chill and great and good. I’m sure that mirrors other people’s situations too.”
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