David Thorstad (1941 – 2021): Gay Activist and NAMBLA Co-Founder

Writer, editor, translator, gardener, socialist, and activist with portfolios from anti-war to indigenous rights, David Thorstad died in Fargo, North Dakota, August 1, 2021, at age 79. He was a NAMBLA co-founder whose biography perhaps best exemplifies pederasty's inclusion in the main currents of gay liberation and radical 1970s politics. He continued to serve on NAMBLA's steering committee until 1996.

Thorstad moved to New York City from his native Minnesota in 1970 and soon threw himself into the gay lib ferment bubbling in aftermath of the Stonewall riots. He was co-founder – and the final president – of the Gay Activists Alliance, an offshoot of the immediately post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Front that shifted to a focus on practical legal reforms. Thorstad also was a co-founder in 1977 of the New York City's Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights, whose goal was shepherding a gay rights bill through the city council.

"The 1969 Stonewall Riots changed my life," Thorstad said in a 2019 interview with the LGBTQ History Project. "As I stood along New York’s Sixth Avenue for the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march a year later watching the several thousand gay people go by, I knew my life would never be the same. I had enjoyed homosexual experiences since age nine. Yet, during twelfth-grade social-studies class, I asked a classmate, 'What is a homosexual?' Despite years of sex play with other boys (and a few girls), I was beginning to suspect that I might be different. Same-sex exploration came naturally. Identity had nothing to do with it. Homosexual behavior—even though we didn’t have a word for it—was just part of being a boy in rural Minnesota in the 1950s."

After reading in the Village Voice about efforts in Boston to fight back against anti-gay attacks on men who had relationships with teenage boys, Thorstad got in contact with Tom Reeves, one of the key Boston organizers, and participated in the conference on age of consent out of which NAMBLA emerged.

"I was shocked that any man would come out so openly about his pederasty as Tom did in that article," Thorstad recalled in a 2012 remembrance of Reeves. "I didn’t yet know him. But I was a prominent gay activist in New York and wrote a manifesto about gay liberation and man/boy love for Gay Community News, an important gay and lesbian paper published in Boston.

"We decided to hold a meeting after the conference for those who might wish to form an organization for men and boys who loved each other. About 30 of us met and formed a group we called (initially) Man/Boy Lovers of North America. A few days later, Tom called me to say he thought a better name would be North American Man/Boy Love Association, mainly because it would result in a pronounceable acronym: NAMBLA. I agreed, despite the fact that the name sounded a bit like it might be a baby food."

David Thorstad was born October 15, 1941 in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, where his father was chief of police. He played oboe and piano in high school, and went on to the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1963 and earning an MA in French, German, and Scandinavian languages in 1965. He moved to France and in 1967 served on the Paris Secretariat of the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, focused on the U.S. war in Vietnam. Returning to Minnesota, he was an organizer with the Twin Cities Socialist Workers Party, and in 1968, its candidate for Congress, then in 1969, Minneapolis mayor. Moving to New York to pursue work in left organizing, he saw the 1970 gay pride march, and soon threw himself into the burgeoning movement.

Thorstad broke with the SWP in 1973, citing its unenthusiasm for gay liberation. In 1976, he leaked the SWP's internal wranglings in Gay Liberation and Socialism: Documents from the Discussions on Gay Liberation inside the Socialist Workers Party (1970–1973).

1974 saw the publication of Thorstad's co-authored The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864 1935), a groundbreaking short book which uncovered the thought and sometimes organizing of figures such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Karoly Maria Kertbeny, Edward Carpenter, and Magnus Hirschfeld. Christopher Isherwood praised the volume: "A book like this is of immense value," he wrote. "It is a reminder to other minorities that homosexuals are their brother-victims of persecution. And, to the vast, unthinking but not heartless majority of heterosexuals, it is a challenge. The book was re-issued in 1995 and is still available.

"I considered David a friend for some 40 years, and first knew him from his work in NAMBLA, where he was already on his fourth or fifth twist of his activist career," says one former steering committee member. "He was a one-man Socialist International, and his graceful cosmopolitanism shined through in his journalistic ethnographies of boy-love traditions in Egypt's Siwa oasis and Mexico's Yucatan. David's brusque rejection of thinking he deemed sloppy or corrupt sometimes put me, then a green-behind-ears teenage comrade, in his cross-hairs. But he was part of what made NAMBLA feel like a vital solar plexus of vital sexual politics. Channeling to NAMBLA some of the best of the leftist tradition, Thorstad brought no ego to debate, but was vigorous in advancing what he considered correct and grounded, though was always open to argument. He brought to NAMBLA some of the air and urgency of Weimar street battles, where questions of strategy and slogan could be life and death – as indeed they became around work around man/boy-love, as it became the fork in the road in gay organizing, delivering rights and assimilation to conformist gays and lesbians and gulags for pederasts."

The gay movement's shift to concerns such as military inclusion, same-sex marriage, and embrace of "queer" and transgender ideology riled Thorstad, and helped occasion his retreat from gay activism and a return to rural Minnesota in 1999. In rural homestead on the White Earth Indian Reservation south of Lengby (population 87) he gardened, grew prize-winning heirloom tomatoes and garlic, continued his book editing work, and studied the local native Ojibwe language.

"The struggle for sexual liberation has been diluted by a focus on dozens of fanciful and questionable genders and has resulted in a virtual erasure of gay males and lesbians," Thorstad said in an interview before the Stonewall 50 march in 2019, explaining why he wasn't going. "Sex is not even part of the alphabet-soup vocabulary. Highlighting victimhood is in. Instead of fighting social injustice, the LGBT goal is to assimilate into a heterodominant capitalist system, aping its failed institution of marriage, promoting monogamy (a bit player in the mammalian heritage), and espousing patriotism, militarism, and conventionality."

"[M]uch of the left today has abandoned class and class struggle," Thorstad wrote in a 2020 email to friends, "for nebulous, liberal notions of 'equality' for all, no matter how little it has to do with 'scientific Marxism,' rationality, materialism, or even common sense. All postmodernist bullshit where nothing means what it is anymore.... "So far has the left strayed from its roots in historical materialism and reason ... its influence in society has dwindled to near insignificance."

David died of a heart attack on August 1, 2021, in the course of a routine angioplasty at Sanford Hospital in Fargo. His passing was noted with an obituary in New York's Gay City News, where one of his colleagues from gay activism was quoted, “A giant has fallen. This is a great loss.”

Those of us who worked and sometimes fought with David over the decades in NAMBLA concur. Acerbic, cheerful, opinionated, a patriotic citizen only of our common humanity, David Thorstad was a paragon of principle, political courage, and historical memory.

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David Thorstad resources

Thorstad donated a collection of audio tapes to the University of Minnesota’s Jean Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies. The collection includes interviews with French theorist Guy Hocquenghem and conversations with U.S. activists Harry Hay and Jim Kepner along with recordings of many of Thorstad’s media appearances on behalf of NAMBLA.

A collection of writings by Thorstad can be found here.

Interviews and a tribute to Thorstad appears at on the LGBTQ History Project here and here.

New York’s Gay City News has a thorough obituary for Thorstad here.

https://www.lgbtqhp.org/david-thorstad

https://www.lgbtqhp.org/thorstad-tribute

https://www.lgbtqhp.org/david-thorstad-marriage

https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/13/resources/7571

https://www.gaycitynews.com/former-gay-activists-alliance-president-david-thorstad-dies-80

http://williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Thorstad,_David