David Thorstad

David Thorstad

David Thorstad (1941 – 2021) was an American political activist and author who was a prominent member of the gay rights movement since the 1970s, and was a founding member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), a group which advocates the abolition of Age of Consent laws. He was also active in Socialist / Trotskyist politics for some years.

From 1967 to 1973, Thorstad was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), once the main American Trotskyist organisation. After leaving the SWP because of its attitude to homosexuality he 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). In the early 1970s, Thorstad was president of the Gay Activists Alliance, a leading gay liberation group in New York.

In 1974 Thorstad and John Lauritsen published The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935), an important work which linked the modern gay liberation movement to older movements for homosexual rights, particularly in Germany, and showed the links between those movements and the socialist movement.

In 1978, Thorstad was a founding member of NAMBLA, and remained active in the sexual freedom movement until his death. He was one of a group of NAMBLA members who were sued for the wrongful death of a ten-year-old boy in a long-running court case in Boston (Curley v NAMBLA).

David Thorstad's involvement with NAMBLA led him to break with the increasingly "consenting adults in private only" gay rights movement, which became increasingly hostile to NAMBLA's views and activities since the 1980's. In 1998, Thorstad told an audience: "Pederasty is the main form that male homosexuality has acquired throughout Western civilization - and not only in the West! Pederasty is inseparable from the high points of Western culture - ancient Greece and the Renaissance." Thorstad describes the modern gay rights movement as "politically correct zombies," and the "radicalism of such groups as Queer Nation" as "bizarre and offensive."

Summaries of Thorstad's views appear in his articles "Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement" (1991), published in a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality (with guest editors Theo Sandfort, Edward Brongersma, and Alex Van Naerssen) - itself published as a book titled Male Intergenerational Intimacy: Historical, Socio-Psychological and Legal Perspectives (Harrington Park Press, 1991) - and "Homosexuality and the American Left: The Impact of Stonewall," in Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left (Gert Hekma et al., editors, Harrington Park Press, 1995).

See also

• Chronological Archive - Contains many of his writings on our topic

• Historical examples of LGBT-MAP unity

External links

• A collection of Thorstad's writings - Archived by Dr. William A. Percy.
• Wikipedia bio - Detailed biography, with gay-rights background.
• Thorstad reflects on his collaboration with Tom Reeves.
• The David Thorstad Collection - University of Minnesota archive.
• Obituaries for Thorstad: Gay City News and The LGBTQ History Project.

See also

• Tom Reeves
• Harry Hay
• Charles Shively
• Bill Andriette
• Joseph Doucé
• John P. De Cecco
• Journal of Homosexuality