Warning: This post contains graphic language.
Yesterday, Bryan Fischer brought Joseph Sciambra onto Focal Point to discuss Sciambra’s new book, Swallowed By Satan, which is a tale of his journey out of homosexuality, neo-Nazism, and Satan worship. Like other ex-gay activists, Sciambra offers harrowing accounts of early sexual trauma, drug abuse and risky sexual behaviors, including public sex and flashing men.
While Sciambra says he identified as gay, he also claims he was obsessed with female pornography (describing it as a “succubus”) and regularly frequented female sex workers and brothels. Sciambra explains that he began to sleep with men because “women did not have the physical strength for the type of abuse I needed,” and as a result he fell into Satan’s digestive tract until “my continued presence in his bowel became an irritant [and] I was passed out”:
Satan swallowed me whole. I would spend a decade in his gut. Miraculously, a protective layer prevented my full destruction in the digestive tract of the devil. When my continued presence in his bowel became an irritant, I was passed out onto the street. To be stepped upon and washed away into the gutter.
Much of the book is dedicated to graphic accounts of Sciambra having brutal sex with other men; he claims that he hears different voices, which he seems to think are demonic spirits, that tell him to engage in activities such as sadomasochism and pornography. He even writes about having sex with demonic figures.
In one story, he goes to a club to get “gang-banged” and during sex “conceives” a demon in his anus. After sex, the demon “gushed from my body” in his discharge and “would grow and pitilessly hover about me. Sometimes, it spoke.”
All I could think about were the magical claims by [occultist] Alester Crowley that anal sex unleashed a rare form of demonic spirit. In fact, he taught that these devils would be conceived within the anus during sodomy. I believed this wholeheartedly. I wanted these entities to take me over.... Then, with no warning, a rush of liquid gushed from my body. It was slimy and mixed with blood. I gave birth to the devil I prayed for. In the coming years, it would grow and pitilessly hover about me. Sometimes, it spoke.
He warns readers that he opened himself up to occult practices by innocently using a Ouija board as a child and contends that part of homosexuality is a “pseudo-religion [that is] certainly Satanic.”
The voices in his head told him to “debase” himself through sex in order to get closer to Satan: “[I]n my debasement, I received a congratulatory elevation from the devil. I was doing his work. My pain was only alleviated in evil.”
“I think my further descent into hell started with an occult sex ritual that I engaged in” with “a gay cabal of male witches,” where he had group sex with a man with “the head of a goat or ram.”
“I knew that what I would be drinking upon was the darkness of hell,” Sciambra writes while describing a different account of sadomasochistic group sex. “They had prepared my walking remains for the final immolation. I was on the altar, the knife was raised, and I was ready to go.”
Finally, injured by all the group sex, Sciambra went to the hospital with his mom and he saw demons appear over his hospital bed: “Then, a huge empty space opened up behind the bed’s headboard. An immense open and salivating mouth breathed a stinking and moist heat upon the back of my neck. I was being pulled up and outwards. I heard a voice say, ‘Open-wide.’”
