You probably also know that Bowen is openly gay — but when he was younger, there were some early struggles with coming out to his family.
In an interview with TODAY‘s Willie Geist that’s set to air tomorrow, the comedian and actor revealed that his parents had him undergo conversion therapy as a teenager. Conversion therapy is currently banned in 23 US states — including Colorado, the state in which he was raised — as well as in Washington, D.C.
Bowen explained that his parents had given him an ultimatum: If he underwent conversion therapy, he would be allowed to attend New York University and live with his sister in NYC. “Those poor people did not realize it’s one of the gayest schools in the country,” he laughed. “I just knew I had to live there.”
“And so I kind of played along and I kind of just humored them and myself into seeing what it was, not knowing that it was ultimately very painful and detrimental,” he said. “And there was a lot of healing that happened after that.”
Bowen also explained that he didn’t so much directly come out to his parents, as it happened that they “just sort of 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,'” he explained. “That was sort of their concept of it. And so I give them a lot of grace for that, because they just have no context for it.”
Bowen also explained that he “really didn’t get to work through” his identity as a queer person before his parents found out. “I think I probably wasn’t brave enough back then to express that, or to package it in a way that they could understand,” he explained, “because it felt completely foreign to them, and it was completely foreign to them.”
“Identity is this really fickle thing,” he added. “It’s not something that you arrive at until much later in life, I think. I didn’t really get a grasp on who I was until like, two years ago.”
You can tune in to TODAY on NBC tomorrow morning for the full interview.