Bowen Yang’s Complete Dating History
4 min readTHE RUNDOWN
- Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang is publicly single and has kept his love life almost completely private.
- The queer comedian has spoken about his coming out journey and experience dating in New York.
- He also revealed he has used Raya and discussed his stance on dating apps.
Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang is famous for so many things. Not only has he been a centerpiece of the venerated sketch show for years, he also has a huge following as the co-host of podcast Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers, now running for almost a decade. Yang also had a key role in the massive hit Wicked, playing Galinda’s popular kid buddy, Pfannee, as well as starring in The Wedding Banquet, Fire Island, Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens, plus many more film and TV hits.
With so many fans, there’s naturally some curiosity about his personal life. Yang tends to be very open about his opinions and shares a lot on his podcast, especially about queerness and identity. In the April 13 episode of Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist, Yang discussed being one of a few openly LGBTQ+ cast members in 50 seasons of Saturday Night Live and the challenges growing up as a queer person.
“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 said of coming out to his parents. “Because it felt completely foreign to them, and it was completely foreign to them. I ‘came out,’ quote, unquote, in the sense that my parents just sort of stumbled upon something.”
He added, “They were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t realize this is what we were dealing with. Where we come from, this doesn’t happen.’ 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. And so we went to conversion therapy.”
Yang has mentioned attending conversion therapy before, but here he expanded, explaining his parents agreed to let him move to New York if he went.
“I just knew I had to live there,” he said. “And so I kind of played along, and I kind of just humored them and myself into seeing what it was. And not knowing that it was ultimately very painful and detrimental and there was a lot of healing that happened after that.”
Yang continued, “Identity is this really fickle thing. It’s not something that you arrive at until much later in life, I think. Like, I think I didn’t really get a grasp on who I was until two years ago.”
While the comedian seems comfortable talking about that part of his history now, he is still very discreet about who he’s actually dating. So here’s what is known about Yang’s dating history so far.
Is Bowen Yang dating anyone?
In a June 2023 story with Rolling Stone’s Marlow Stern, Yang talked a bit about dating while being a cast member on SNL, joking that so many famous couples seem to have met on set.
“Lorne [Michaels] has a wonderful little matchmaking service, inadvertently,” Yang said. “I think that’s a lovely little fringe benefit of being on the show.”
But he was quick to say he hasn’t been a part of the matchmaking energy.
“I don’t know if it’s because of the queerness that I feel like it doesn’t apply to me almost, but I’m not working with the same pool, so I don’t think about it in the same way,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Good for them! I’m sure it’s lovely.’”
Yang did say he was on Raya, the celebrity dating app, but only “minimally.”
“Look, who wouldn’t want to not be on the apps and meet people?” Yang added. “I’m having a hard time with it on my own. Outside of work I’m like, ‘Oh god, I’ve gotta open up this thing to meet these people?’”
Has he publicly dated anyone?
Yang has never named names, but he has shared stories from his dating life in recent years. In 2022, he spoke on an episode of the podcast Couple’s Therapy and joked that he was “perpetually single.”
He did share a story about someone he had dated that summer after meeting them on an app. Yang characterized the connection as a bit of a whirlwind, including time spent together on Fire Island (which is coincidentally also the title of one of Yang’s movies). He shared that they initially connected over common interests, but the guy started posting a number of pictures and pushing for a deeper connection very fast.
Yang felt like the date was pushing at a “crazy clip” to become “life partners” with a lot of “love bombing,” and the public posting and displays were a bit too much. He called it off, deciding it was not the right fit for where he’s at in life now.