Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang has spoken candidly about the emotional toll of undergoing gay conversion therapy as a teenager, describing the experience as “painful and detrimental”.
In a preview clip for this Sunday’s episode of Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist, Yang revisits a chapter of his adolescence that he says he never really processed.
“I didn’t really get to work through it,” he told Geist. “I think I probably wasn’t brave enough back then to express that or to package it in a way that [my parents] could understand. It felt completely foreign to them.”
Yang, one of only a handful of openly LGBTQ+ cast members in Saturday Night Live’s 50-year history, first publicly shared his experience with conversion therapy in an interview with The New York Times. He was 17 when his parents discovered what he described as “lewd conversations” on AOL Instant Messenger, inadvertently outing him.
Yang presently reflects on his parent’s reaction with a degree of empathy now he recognises the cultural disconnect.
“They were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t realise this is what we were dealing with. Where we come from, this doesn’t happen.’ That was their concept of it. And so I give them a lot of grace for that - because they had no context.”
His parents then presented him with an ultimatum: undergo conversion therapy and attend New York University alongside his sister, or remain in Denver and study locally.
Yang said the draw of New York was irresistible: “I just knew I had to live there,” he said. “So I kind of played along - I humoured them, and I humoured myself - into seeing what it was. Not knowing that it was ultimately very painful and detrimental. And there was a lot of healing that happened after that.”
Yang has previously spoken about the long-term psychological impact of the experience, which he has explored in both his comedy and personal reflections.
In speaking out again, he joins a growing number of LGBTQ+ public figures challenging the practice of conversion therapy and highlighting its lasting harm.
Last year, the new Labour government said it planned to introduce a Conversion Practices Bill to ban treatment aimed at changing or suppressing someone’s sexual orientation and gender identity in England and Wales.
