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David Thorstad (October 15, 1941 – August 1, 2021)^[1][2] was an American political activist who co-founded or ran a number of homosexual rights groups following the Stonewall riots in 1969, including as a former president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance.^[3] He later engaged in pedophilia and pederasty activism with the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), of which he was a founding member.^[4]

Thorstad was active in Trotskyist politics for some years. For more than six years, he was a member of the Upper West Side branch of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and a staff writer for its newspaper, The Militant. He left the SWP in December 1973, citing the organization’s lack of enthusiasm for the gay liberation movement and failure to develop a “Marxist materialist analysis” of it. In 1976 he self-published a collection of internal party documents relating to its discussion of the gay liberation movement under the title Gay Liberation and Socialism: Documents from the Discussions on Gay Liberation Inside the Socialist Workers Party (1970-1973).^[5]

In the early 1970s, Thorstad was president of the Gay Activists Alliance, a leading gay liberation group in New York.^[6]

In June 1973, Thorstad and John Lauritsen published “The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935)” in the SWP internal Discussion Bulletin, attempting to prove that the gay liberation movement had a long and substantial history, particularly in Germany.^[7] This 14-page historical survey was expanded the next year into a 92-page book of the same name published by Times Change Press, a New York publishing house specializing in feminist and politically progressive books.^[8] The book was translated into Spanish^[9] and German.^[10]

In 1977, Thorstad founded the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights.^[11]

Thorstad described himself as a bisexual pederast and atheist (a “recovered” Pentecostal) who had “never been charged with violating any sex laws”.^[12]

In 1978, he became a co-founder of NAMBLA, and “served as a member of the Steering Committee from some undetermined time until September 1996”. He was one of a group of NAMBLA members who were sued in 2000 for the wrongful death of a ten-year-old boy in a long-running court case Curley v. NAMBLA in Boston.^[13]

Thorstad claimed that “pederasty is probably historically the most common form of homosexuality in Western culture, as well as many other cultures”,^[14][15] and that “child abuse hysteria is an industry of insanity aimed at homosexuals [which] … plays on the impression people have always had of homosexuals as being child molesters.” He described opposition to NAMBLA as “… [similar] to one waged by ‘lesbian feminists who jumped right on the bandwagon’ of what he called the anti-gay male/child pornography scare”, according to The Advocate.^[16] He also likened being a pederast in the United States to being “a Jew in Nazi Germany” and criticized the mainstream LGBT community for its assimilationist approach towards capitalist and heterocentric society.^[15] He said that the label LGBT is “the most absurd one of all” and is “far too fixed an identity, eliding the fluidity of sexuality and sexual behavior … in that sense[,] Kinsey’s scale is valid.”^[14] He also maintained that “assimilationist homosexual groups[,] … the psychiatric profession and the bourgeois media, such as the New York Times … all nowadays blur distinctions by lumping everything under the rubric ‘pedophilia,’ an absurdity apparently intended to criminalize love and force very different behaviors into one negative pigeonhole.”^[14]

Summaries of Thorstad’s views appear in his essays “Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement”^[17] and “Homosexuality and the American Left: The Impact of Stonewall”.^[18]

With the turn of the millennium, Thorstad became a critic of the way in which the sexual liberationist goals of gay politics were replaced by the identity politics that came to dominate the movement.^[19] For example, he came to oppose pursuing same-sex marriage and the inclusion of transgender people in the gay rights movement.^[2]

David Thorstad’s archival papers are now held at the University of Minnesota.

• Israel: a colonial-settler state? by Maxime Rodinson New York, Monad Press; distributed by Pathfinder Press, 1973 (translated from the French by Thorstad)
• The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) New York; Times Change Press, 1974 with John Lauritsen
• Gay Liberation and Socialism : Documents from the Discussions on Gay Liberation Inside the Socialist Workers Party (1970-1973) pt.2, pt.3 editor, [New York] : Thorstad, [introd. 1976]
• No apologies: the unauthorized publication of internal discussion documents of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) concerning lesbian/gay male liberation. Part 2, 1975-79 editor, [New York : D.Thorstad] ; New York (415 W. 23rd St., Box 11F, New York 10011) 1980
• Le Gay Voyage: Guide et regard homosexuels sur les grandes métropoles interviewee, [New York : D. Thorstad]; Paris (22 rue Huyghens, 75014): Albin Michel, 1980
• A Witchhunt foiled: the FBI vs. NAMBLA New York : North American Man/Boy Love Association, 1985 (introduction)
• Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement by David Thorstad (1991, Haworth Press, Inc.)
• Homosexuality and the American Left by David Thorstad (1995, Haworth Press, Inc.)
• Harry Hay on Man/Boy Love by David Thorstad
• Pederasty and Homosexuality by David Thorstad
• Various articles at MRZine