Is Gay Sex Satanic? Yes! But It’s Not What You Think…
“Abandon hope, all you who enter here.” - Dante Alighieri
Watch NSFW trailer of Stockholm Syndrome
from Seventh Circle
Is Gay Sex Satanic? Yes! But It’s Not What You Think…
I’ve just returned from Germany from an amazing onsite shoot with Himeros.tv. This set of films, which I wrote, is called Seventh Circle, a deep dive into some of the darker aspects of the gay psyche. In it, we explored multiple facets of sadism and objectification, bringing consciousness to areas that are normally suppressed in our everyday life. The actors and crew were so wonderful, and I’m so excited to share a bit more about the idea of projected evil. Let me explain…
The roots of our collective shame are deep and take many forms throughout our lives, leaving us with an assumption that something is wrong with us. On the contrary, nothing is wrong with us. In fact, all along, shame has been a fundamental organizing force in the human psyche, functioning to solidify social bonds by ensuring our adherence to customary group interactions and avoidance of taboos that might disintegrate that solidarity.
However, as human cultures have generally evolved beyond a tooth-and-nail existence, our social networks appear vastly different than those of our ancestors. Today, in the West, we live largely fluid lives, and our tribes are scattered across the globe in individualistically influenced clusters that we choose; more than ever, we maintain those social bonds via specifically designated meetups or digitally. Regardless, the animal instincts that once formed us as we once gathered in small tribes still swim in the depths of our collective imagination: despite our astonishing technological advancement, we remain brutal and primitive. Whereas shame, in some ways, formerly bonded us together, it is now a powerfully operative factor in our collective human suicide. Resultantly, the spiritual urgency of our times requires that, instead of fixating on the ascension of our psyches, we must locate within ourselves the sources of our shame—our inherent “evil”—what we project outwardly onto the world around us.
For the vast majority of gay men, a sense of belonging has been torn from us as children, and the projected shame of those around us has dragged us into painful beginnings that we did not originally choose for ourselves. Yet, because of these collective and individual traumas, we often continue to choose pain long after leaving childhood. Likely, we carry with us the burdens of rejection, abuse, helplessness, a deficit of belonging, and a variety of spiritual distortions. Even if we have not endured a religious upbringing, our cultural pretext has still been infused with a Judeo-Christian frame, so we have been shaped by these theologies and their subsequent effects on our psyches. We have been taught that who we are as men is an abomination to the gods of our cultural leans, that the desires of our bodies are temptations foisted upon us by the Devil.
Interestingly, the concept of the Devil evolved from a multicultural combination of folklore about Lucifer (which, ironically, means light-bringer in Latin) from various pagan civilizations as well as astrological references to the planet Venus, now associated with the Divine Feminine. The early Christian church synthesized these substrates into our famously projected adversary, the Devil. Since then, the Devil has become the mythic personification of all that has been violently disavowed from the Christian ego including lust, power, and self-preservation at all costs.
Around 1314, the poet Dante Alighieri introduced the Inferno, the infamous literary depiction of Lucifer’s fall from Heaven. In Dante’s vision, Lucifer and his rebel angels struck the earth with such tremendous force that a crater was formed—all the way to the center of the planet—leaving an underground city of torment at its core. This depiction of Hell was divided into nine concentric circles, each ring intensifying in punishment as one descended toward the center. “Sodomites” and homosexuals were relegated to the seventh circle next to murderers and those who’d committed violence against God—a powerful referendum on gay shame and its severe location in Christian mythology, just two rings away from the core of evil, Satan himself.
Overall, Dante’s influence on theological art and culture has been long-lasting, even into the present, and his contribution to religious thought has produced a dual effect. To our modern lineage of fundamental thought, graphic images of Hell became terrifying motivators to cling to religious promises of salvation from sin. But to an evolving intellectual consciousness, Dante’s allegory made it possible to begin imagining Hell as abstract and non-literal. It is this abstraction that allows us to take a closer look at what Hell might represent to us personally and collectively. Hell is not a literal place, though, for many of us, the torment is real. Instead, the Devil clutches our psyches by way of shame and unprocessed trauma, impacting how we feel about ourselves and how we move through our lives as gay men. We feel him in the stories we tell ourselves about how we are undeserving. We sense him in our judgments of others. We locate him in the evil that we see around us but refuse to claim as our own.
Seventh Circle is an exploration of dark power as a motivator in the gay psyche, sex that is tinted with desires to sadistically consume, control, manipulate, and torture. It is a playfully dramatic expression of what must be owned if we are to become whole. In owning our darkness, we make it possible to evolve—not because we need to be saved, but because we have looked into the darkness of our hearts and have triumphed over denial and the evils therein. Shame cannot thrive in the consciousness that results from unrelenting honesty.
I invite you to embrace Lucifer, Bringer of Light.