Bridger Winegar Had a Nervous Breakdown on a Mormon Mission, Which is Never Good

It’s not really the most direct route to comedy success: grow up in conservative Mormon Utah, be closeted about your sexuality even to yourself, try to live up to what is expected of you, ditch it all for show biz, come out of the closet, and then make it big. But we know it’s worked for at least one person: Bridger Winegar. The host of the I Said No Gifts podcasts walks us through his effort to figure out who he was, which included a long stretch of figuring he’d have to keep his homosexuality shielded for the rest of his life. We hear about a Mormon mission to Malaysia that ended very prematurely with a nervous breakdown, an offer to get treatment in a Singapore mental hospital, and a return to Utah. And we hear about the extraordinary support and kindness he received from his boss when his boss happened to be Jimmy Kimmel.

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