26 GQ.COM APRIL 2020
The
FixFashionwith his own account, posting com-
ments like “Wreck me daddy” and
“Destroy me king” under, say, a photo
of Nick Jonas. Bowen cowrote the
sketch last year with his old colleague
Julio Torres. It got shelved until Styles
was brought on as host: He came
into Bowen’s o∞ce, flipped through
the script, and purportedly couldn’t
stop laughing. “Harry, who has sort
of been gleefully straddling the line
between queerness and whatever else,
seemed like the perfect person for it,”
says Bowen. “The sketch was just this
completely insane, loud dog whistle to
the queer community, with all of the
specific depressed gay voice.”
Bowen’s onscreen creations veer
toward the weird and inane, but
in person he’s attentive, thought-
ful, inquisitive—a patient observer
attuned to the ambient absurdities
swirling around him. “He’s definitely
one of the smartest, most intuitive
people I know,” says Matt Rogers,
Bowen’s best friend and his cohost on
the cultishly popular comedy podcast
Las Culturistas. “He is so smart that
he also really knows how to be stupid.”
One might assume that brains
run in the family: Dad was born in
China, earned a doctorate in mining
engineering in Australia, and came
with the family to America by way
of Canada. Mom was a successful
ob-gyn back in China. Bowen spent
his teen years in Aurora, Colorado,
and describes his younger self as
something of a ham who was voted
Most Likely to Be a Cast Member
on Saturday Night Live by his high
school classmates.
At one point during lunch, Bowen
tells a story about how his parents
found an “open chat window” on the
family computer, which is how they
learned that Bowen was gay. “I had
never seen my dad cry before up until
that point,” says Bowen. “And I was
coming home from school every day
to him sobbing.”
Soon, Dad pitches Bowen on the
idea of conversion therapy to “fix”
his queerness. It wasn’t that the fam-
ily was religious or anything. It was
more: “We solve problems in this
Bl a ze r, $1,5 95,
and shirt, $595,
by Sies Marjan.
Turtleneck,
$600, by Versace.
Pants, $125,
by COS. Shoes,
$550, by Fratelli
Rossetti.house, and this feels like a solution,”
explains Bowen. “We’re not really
going to look into how it’s destructive
or bad or terrible.” So a 17-year-old
Bowen, perhaps implicitly under-
standing that his parents may be
operating from a place of fear, opens
up a little bit of space in his heart and
goes, “Okay, if it means you’ll stop
being this sad...then sure.”Therapy was two hours south, in
Colorado Springs, where the mega-
churches are visible from space. Dad
waited in the lobby while Bowen
would visit with “some quack,” and
then father and son would make the
drive back up I-25—which strangely
enough “became a fun bonding
experience,” Bowen says, even if the
therapy itself didn’t do all that much.