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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