New 'SNL' Star Bowen Yang Opens Up About Parents Sending Him to Conversion Therapy

Openly gay "Saturday Night Live" cast member Bowen Yang, in an extensive interview with the New York Times, revealed that when he was a teenager his parents sent him to so-called "conversion" therapy, a quack practice that purports to "turn" gay people into heterosexuals, often through prayer or a combination of prayer and talk therapy.

The result? The "therapy" was ... wait for it; let the suspense build... utterly and completely ineffectual, just as reputable mental health professionals warn it to be. Though mental health experts also advise that the sham "therapy" can be deeply damaging and dangerous to already-vulnerable LGBTQ youth, Yang spoke of his experience as more or less rolling off him, and evinced no shame then or now for being gay.

Recalled Yang:

"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 men.' 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."

Yang did engage with the "therapy" as a "thought experiment," he said, even though he also believed it was "all completely crackers." But his parents - Chinese immigrants from a very "traditional" background - were unable to comprehend or accept that they had a gay son. Yang spoke of his ordinarily stoic father dissolving in tears over the dinner table each night, so distraught was he at having a gay son.

The comedian disclosed:

"I spent freshman year trying straightness on for size and failing miserably," he says. "I sort of tricked myself into having a crush on a girl but it was just kind of a weird, weird, weird pit stop. Then I would look at a boy and be like, 'Oh, I want to talk to him.' "

Eventually, Yang said, he had to stand his ground with his parents, recounting that,

"I just got to this place of standing firm and being like, 'This is sort of a fixed point, you guys. I can't really do anything about this. So either you meet me here or you don't meet me.' "

But Yang harbors no bitterness toward his parents, the New York Times article noted. "Both my parents are doing a lot of work to just try to understand and I can't rush them," he pointed out. "I can't resent them for not arriving at any place sooner than they're able to get there."

Social media is another game, though, and Yang has encountered his share of anti-LGBTQ trolling online, the article reported. As his star has risen, the unapologetically gay comedian has been targeted with toxic Twitter troll age that, the NYT reported, is both "homophobic and racist."

Saying that the comments on social media are "nothing I haven't heard before in my life," Yang nonetheless described the experience of scrolling through a hate-filled Twitter feed as being "masochistic":

"We tell ourselves, 'It's important to get a sense of what people are saying about me.' But it really feeds some narcissistic impulse to check and see if people like you. I would scroll through my feed, and it would be horrible."

Still, he who laughs last - and loudest - is often he who rises above.