As a child, Samir knew he was gay. Attracted to boys, he began experimenting sexually with his playmates but never talked about it.1 Homosexuality was taboo in the Muslim country in which he was raised. Samir and his family moved to Sweden when he was 16. He was delighted to live in a country in which homosexuality was welcomed.
Samir learned Swedish quickly and rose to the top of his high school class. Following graduation he worked as an aerobics instructor and was active in Stockholm’s gay bar scene. Although free to live the life he felt born to live, Samir wasn’t happy. He decided to move to Los Angeles, California.
“L.A. is extremely gay,” he recalled. “Beautiful cars, beautiful people . . . I was in ‘gay heaven.’ All the men were asking me out on dates.”
Samir took real estate training and was soon negotiating multimillion-dollar deals in star-studded Beverly Hills. Before long, Samir changed his name to Sam Jacobson, assuming it would sound better in America.
Well-known throughout Hollywood, he had a contact list that was filled with celebrities with whom he did business and socialized regularly. Before long, Sam was approached by one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood, inviting him to be his boyfriend. The two became one of the hottest couples in the city. Nevertheless, Sam still didn’t have real happiness. And neither did his friends.
“My boyfriend was a billionaire, but woke up every morning with anxiety, terrified he would lose it all,” he said. Trying to ease his own anxiety and depression, Sam took a cocktail of antidepressants and other treatments, but nothing helped.
Searching for Satisfaction
A severe blow came with the death of Sam’s mother. Desperate, Sam went deep into the occult, attending high-powered séances. During this time Sam’s niece, Vala, visited from Sweden. They had been best friends since childhood.
In California the two attended highly spiritualistic sessions. Sam asked the spirits to put him in touch with his dead mother; Vala, whose life was full of drugs and alcohol as she attempted to drown out her childhood pain, simply wanted to “find the truth.”
The demons posed as Sam’s “mother” and warned him that Vala was a “child of darkness.” They ordered him to immediately cut all contact with Vala, so Sam quickly sent her back to Sweden.
God, however, heard Vala’s cry and miraculously led her to Himself. “Jesus set me free,” she said later. “In just one day I became drug-free. He cleansed me, and I felt His love.”
Sam kept trying to contact his mother, but the spiritualistic rituals didn’t work; he could no longer access the spirit world. Meanwhile, his niece was praying for him, half a world away.
“Just Be Myself”
Around this time Laleh, a well-known Iranian-Swedish pop star living in Los Angeles, asked Sam to fly to Sweden to accept a QX Readers music award on her behalf for her hit single, “Just Be Myself.” QX is the largest LGBT-media publisher in Scandinavia, and its yearly Gaygalan Awards is broadcast on national television.
Standing on the QX Gaygalan stage was a high moment for Sam as he encouraged everyone to “come out and just be yourself!”
Throwing himself further into the gay life, Sam had multiple sex partners and dove deeper into drugs. He finally ended up in the hospital. After 30 days of rehab, Sam was still at a loss; nothing seemed to help.
He got in touch with his niece and was shocked to hear she was doing well. “Vala had never been doing well,” he recalled. Something had drastically changed.
“She told me God opened her eyes to see the spirit world; to see the evil. Then she told me, ‘We have a God.’ ” Vala found her Savior in Jesus Christ. Encouraged, Sam began to search for himself.
He searched for “Jesus” on YouTube and watched Christian videos. He started reading the Bible. Sam’s heart warmed as he read the teachings of Jesus, and peace finally came.
“It was a completely new element,” he recalled. “I could say no to drugs and sex, and I could sleep during the night.”
The Truth
Then Vala called. “Just so you know,” she said, “if you’re going to follow Jesus, you have to repent from homosexuality.”
“How can God ask me to deny who I am?” Sam fumed. “I am who I am!” He was about to walk away from God, yet didn’t want to lose the peace in his heart.
Sam called a local Christian pastor who said, “God is love. If you get married, you can be gay and have Jesus. It’s the promiscuous gay life that God rejects.”
It was exactly what Sam wanted to hear. But somehow he knew the answer wasn’t right. He couldn’t deny the profound changes taking place in Vala’s life.
“God,” he prayed, “show me the truth.”
For three days Sam was in agony. “I read the Bible for myself, which is abundantly clear about homosexuality,” he said. “I was facing a battle between rejecting the truth and accepting it. Then on the third day I woke up 100 percent convinced that homosexuality is a sin, and I needed to repent. I realized God wanted to remove something that was harmful to me. I went on my knees and cried. ‘I know You are God and You are real, and I know what You want. But how? This is the only life I know.’ ”
Then Sam remembered Abraham and how God had asked him to leave his country, his people, not knowing where he was going.
“I told God, ‘OK, I’ll leave.’ ” From that moment a peace and joy as he had never known washed over Sam, and he knew he was free.
A New Life
Realizing he needed to leave his old life behind, Sam broke up with his boyfriend, wrapped up his business affairs, and returned to Sweden, where God led him and Vala to become members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
In 2022 Samuel shared his testimony to a packed house during a special weekend event titled “LGBTQ—Can You Choose?” Ironically, QX magazine covered the event, and quoted Samuel’s appeal:
“To all of you who live in LGBTQ, I want to say, there is a deep inner deception going on. You have been tricked into thinking you are fighting for something beautiful, like love and equal rights. It sounds very nice, but it is not true. You and I are not our sexual desires and urges; we are made in the image of God, and when we receive Jesus, we are adopted as children of God, and the peace and joy that comes with that passes all understanding. When you have tasted true freedom, you will gladly leave not only homosexuality but everything else that can separate you from Jesus.”2
Reflecting on his experience, Samuel says, “When I tell people I have repented from homosexuality and I now follow Christ, many feel sorry for me and think that I am denying my identity or that I turned my back on the gay community. But the truth is, God saved me from a life of pain, selfishness, and self-destruction. I wish more people would give Jesus Christ a chance.”
1 This article was originally published in Adventist Review online on September 7, 2023.
2 “Han kom ut som stolt gay på QX Gaygalan—föreläser nu som ‘ex-homo’ ” (“He came out as proudly gay at the QX Gaygalan—now lectures as an ‘ex-gay’ ”), QX, Sept. 5, 2022, bit.ly/QXSamJacobson.
