rundown
Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang is officially single and has kept his love life almost completely private, but the queer comedian opened up about his coming out journey and his experience dating in New York. He also revealed that he used Raya and talked about his stance on dating apps.
Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang is famous for so many things. Not only has he been a mainstay on the esteemed sketch show for years, but he’s also garnered a huge following as co-host of the podcast Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers, which has now been running for almost a decade. Yang also had a key role in the blockbuster hit Wicked, where she played Galinda’s popular child sidekick Pfanny, as well as appearing in The Wedding Banquet, Fire Island, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, and many other film and television hits.
With so many fans, there is naturally some curiosity about his personal life. Yang tends to be very open about her opinions and shares a lot on her podcast, especially about queerness and identity. On the April 13 episode of Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist, Yang spoke about being one of the few openly LGBTQ+ cast members on Saturday Night Live over 50 seasons and the challenges of growing up as a queer person.
“I probably didn’t have the courage at the time to express it or put it together in a way that they could understand,” he said of coming out to his parents. “Because it was completely foreign to them, and it was completely foreign to them. I won’t quote, but I ‘came out’ in the sense that my parents stumbled on something.”
He added, “They were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t know this was what we were dealing with. This doesn’t happen where we’re from.'” That was kind of their concept. I give them a lot of leeway on that because they just don’t have the context for it. So we went through conversion therapy. ”
Yang had previously mentioned attending conversion therapy, but now she expanded on the topic, explaining that her parents had agreed to move her to New York if she went.
“I thought I had to live there,” he says. “So I went along with it and used humor to make them and myself understand what it was. And I didn’t know that it ended up being very painful and harmful, and that a lot of healing happened after that.”
Yang continued, “Identity is such a fickle thing. I think it’s something you arrive at much later in life. Similarly, I don’t think I really understood who I was until two years ago.”
Although the comedian now seems comfortable talking about that part of his history, he’s still very cautious about who he’s actually dating. Here’s what we know about Yang’s past relationship history.
Is Bowen Yang dating anyone?
In June 2023, in an article with Marlowe Stern for Rolling Stone magazine, Yan talked a little about dating during her time as a cast member on SNL and joked that many famous couples seem to meet on set.
“Lorne (Michaels) is inadvertently providing a great little matchmaking service,” Yang said. “I think that’s a nice added benefit of being on this show.”
But he quickly said he wasn’t part of the matchmaking energy.
“I don’t know if it’s because of my queerness that I feel like that hardly applies to me, but I don’t work in the same group, so I don’t think about it the same way,” he said. “I thought, ‘Great! It’s going to be great.'”
Mr Yang said he used the celebrity dating app Raya, but it was only “minimal”.
“Who wouldn’t want to use an app and not meet people?” Yang added. “I have a hard time tackling it on my own. Outside of work, I’m like, ‘Oh, do I have to open this to meet these people?'”
Has he ever publicly dated anyone?
Though Yang never names anyone, she shares stories about her dating life in recent years. In 2022, he spoke on an episode of the Couples Therapy podcast and joked that he would be “forever single.”
He shared a story about someone he met on an app that summer and started dating. Yang described the connection as a bit of a whirlwind, including their time together on Fire Island (which also happens to be the title of Yang’s film). He said they initially connected over common interests, but the man posted a lot of photos and quickly began seeking a deeper connection.
Ms. Yang felt like this date was being pushed at “crazy clips” to become “life partners” with lots of “love outbursts,” and the public posts and displays were a little too much. He decided it wasn’t suitable for his current life and called it quits.
