Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang is looking back on his relationship with his parents in the wake of his decision to come out as queer.
“I didn’t really get to work through it,” Yang, 34, said in a Wednesday, April 9, teaser for his upcoming appearance on Sunday Today With Willie Geist. “I think I probably wasn’t brave enough back then to express that or package it in a way they could understand.”
He added, “It felt completely foreign to them, and it was completely foreign to them. I came out in the sense that my parents just stumbled upon something and 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 their concept of it.”
While Yang does give his mom and dad “grace” for their response, he said that they did initially issue an “ultimatum.”
“We went to conversion therapy and part of the ultimatum was, ‘If you go to therapy, then you can go to school at NYU where your sister is,’” Yang recalled before joking, “These poor people did not realize that was one of the gayest schools in the country.”
The other side of his parents’ ultimatum was to avoid conversion therapy but attend a state university near their Denver, Colorado, hometown.
“That would have been great, as well, but I just knew,” he said. “That thing about New York is that I knew I had to live there. So, I played along and I, kind of, just humored them and myself into seeing what it was.”
According to Yang, he didn’t know that the therapy would be “very painful and detrimental.”
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“There was a lot of healing after it,” Yang added. “Identity is a really fickle thing, like, it’s not something you arrive at until much later in life. I don’t think I really got a grasp on who I was until, like, two years ago.”
Yang previously told The New York Times in 2020 that he was 17 years old when he came out, after his parents learned he was having “lewd conversations” with an unidentified individual on AOL Instant Messenger. He has also credited his decision to come out after hearing Lady Gaga’s anthemic “Born This Way” in 2011.
“I had just come out of the closet again when ‘Born This Way’ came out,” he said on a March episode of his “Las Culturistas” podcast. “I went to conversion therapy, obviously didn’t work out, and so Matt [Rogers] came out in college [when we met]. … ‘Born This Way’ came out the same week as this college comedy festival. We would drive from NYU up to Skidmore. We were just blasting that song for 48 straight hours.”
According to Rogers, 35, the Wicked actor then “felt emboldened to come out that weekend.”
