David Thorstad

Who is David Thorstad?

David Thorstad, an American political activist and historian of the gay rights movement since the 1970s, was a founding member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and former president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance. He was also active in Trotskyist politics for some years.

For more than six years, Thorstad was a member of the Upper West Side branch of the Socialist Workers Party, 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. In the early 1970s Thorstad was president of the Gay Activists Alliance, a leading gay liberation group in New York.