SNL star Bowen Yang talks about what it was like going through gay conversion therapy as a teen – etalk

When Saturday Night Live cast member Bowen Yang was 17 years old, his parents went looking through his AOL chat history and found messages that outed him as gay. Bowen described the messages as “lewd conversations” in a New York Times interview implying that from then on, there was no denying who he was. The discovery came with harsh consequences for teenage Yang, who was sent to conversion therapy sessions immediately afterward.

“There was a huge chasm of misunderstanding,” Yang recently told People about the distance that separated his identity from his parents’ conceptions of what their son should be like. “Neither side really understood where the other was coming from, and it led to very dangerous situations overall.” Conversion therapy, a treatment that has been thoroughly debunked by medical science and banned in countries across the globe including Canada, aims to alter a person’s gender or sexual identity. The “therapy” has been shown to cause emotional and even physical trauma. It is often offered by faith groups and targets transgender people disproportionately. 

Yang said that the discovery of his identity at first caused his parents to react with anger. “They just sat me down and yelled at me and said, ‘We don’t understand this. Where we come from, this doesn’t happen.’” Then they signed him up for eight sessions with a gay conversion therapist.

Over time, the comedian’s parents accepted him for who he was. Yang now describes his relationship with his mom and dad as being in a “healthy place.”

Elaborating, he told the magazine, “What was always constant was the intention of love from both sides. It pushed me into questioning what it meant, what was protected and what I should be protective about in terms of being a queer person,” he explained. “I don’t take it for granted.”

And they’re proud of his successes, too (Yang is not only the first Chinese American to become an SNL cast member, he’s also one of the stars of Hot White Heist, a scripted comedy podcast directed by Alan Cumming).

“There has been a nice shift where they go, ‘Great job,'” said Yang. “They’ve just been encouraging in the purest sense. It’s not like I’m getting sketch ideas from them, and they know what the boundaries are. They know that that job has been hard won for me, and that it means a lot, and it means a lot to them too,” he said. “They think, ‘Wow, he pulled it off.’ And my mom said to me recently, she was like, ‘Bowen you’re very lucky to be doing this.’ And I was like, ‘I know mom.'”