APRIL 2020 GQ.COM 27
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The
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Fashion
“The irony is that I end up at NYU,”
he says, “which is like the gayest
undergrad in the world.” (Dad asked
the quack for recommendations for
other quack therapists in NYC, and he
was told: “Unfortunately, there aren’t
that many people in New York who
do this...”)
It’s a common kind of conflict for
first- and second-generation kids:
Your parents are operating from a
place of love, just trying to protect
you, but it’s a hard concept to artic-
ulate, at least at first. “Any distortion
of what they saw as a normative sex-
ual existence was so foreign to them
that they were just trying to figure out
how to make sure I was going to be
okay,” says Bowen. “And the more I’ve
understood that, the more they’ve
expressed that in their own words.”
These days the family is close-
knit. They take frequent vacations
together—Disneyland was a favorite
destination, and the holidays this
year were spent traipsing around
Paris—but at the end of the day
they’re still, y’know, his parents.
“My dad every now and then will
toe that line and be like, You could
try women!” says Bowen, laughing.
“And I’m like...Don’t. It’s almost an
endearing kind of homophobia, if
such a thing exists.”
BACK IN SEPTEMBER, when SNL
announced additions to its lineup—
Bowen, Chloe Fineman, and Shane
Gillis—there was an air of excitement.
Notably around Bowen, the first Asian
American person to join the cast,
provided you discount things like
the one-fourth-Filipino part of Rob
Schneider. But the mood shifted when
the internet uncovered a video from
2018 in which Gillis was heard partic-
ipating in a rambling tangent about
Chinese food, Chinatown, and the peo-
ple who inhabit it. Gillis said the word
“chink” in the clip, and soon his name
became a trending topic on Twitter.
“It was hurtful, but at the same time
it wasn’t even that surprising,” Bowen
says, remembering the incident. “It’s
shit I’ve heard all my life.”
Gillis was ultimately removed from
the show. As the chaos swirled around
them, Bowen tracked down Gillis’s
contact info, opened up some space
in his heart, and texted him some-
thing along the lines of: “Hey, this is
all really crazy.... Let me know if you
want to talk.” When Gillis hit him
back, Bowen says Gillis was contrite.
The two reached an understanding,
and that was that. “He deserves some
level of progression out of this,” says
Bowen. “We both deserve to not live
in this moment that was unfortunate
for everybody for the rest of our
careers.” Folks on the internet (myself
included) pitted Shane against Bowen
when neither of them asked for it,
inadvertently showing how tricky it
is for a young artist burdened with
being a “first”: You might be a product
of your di≠erent overlapping identi-
ties, but you don’t want to be defined
by any one of them. All you want is
the basic human luxury of being seen
as multidimensional—to have the
opportunity to grow and live in your
complications.
“I think the sooner you take respon-
sibility for what reaction you want to
get out of an audience, the better,” says
Bowen, contemplatively, about the
path forward for a boundary-push-
ing comedian trying to do work of
any consequence. “There’s this joke
that Anna Drezen wrote for Melissa
Villaseñor, where Melissa plays every
teen-girl murder suspect on Law &
Order. And there’s this joke in there
that is like, We stabbed her as a joke,
but she took it the wrong way and
started bleeding! If your intention is to
stab someone, do it. You can’t absolve
yourself from the consequence of
someone bleeding, you know?”
The briefest pause, and a redress.
“Does that metaphor track?”
chris gayomali is an articles
editor at gq.
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