REMEMBRANCE
Former Gay Activists Alliance President Dies at 79
Controversial fi gure David Thorstad served in leadership roles, but fell from politics
BY DUNCAN OSBORNE
David Thorstad, who cofounded
or ran some
early LGBTQ groups
following the Stonewall
riots in 1969 that are seen as
marking the start of the modern
LGBTQ rights movement, died on
August 1 from complications during
heart surgery in a North Dakota
hospital.
“A giant has fallen,” wrote Steve
Ault, who made signifi cant contributions
to the community organizing
following the riots, in an email
to Gay City News. “This is a great
loss.”
Thorstad, who was 79 at his
death, was the president of the Gay
Activists Alliance (GAA) from July
1975 to July 1976. He was credited
with stabilizing the group after it
was embroiled in confl ict between
two earlier GAA leaders. Previously,
he served as GAA’s secretary. He
also organized GAA’s educational
efforts titled “The Gay Liberation
Forum.”
In 1977, Thorstad was among
the founders of the Coalition for
Lesbian and Gay Rights (CLGR), a
group that eventually had over 50
member organizations that fought
for the passage of legislation to
add sexual orientation to New York
City’s human rights law, among
other issues.
The legislation was fi rst introduced
in the City Council in
1971, but had been bottled up
by Thomas Cuite, the council’s
Democratic majority leader who
represented a Brooklyn district.
Peter Vallone, a Democrat who
represented a Queens district, led
the majority after Cuite retired in
1985, though Vallone used the
title speaker. As part of a deal to
win the job, Vallone agreed to let
the bill get a vote though he opposed
the legislation. It passed in
a 21-14 vote in 1986.
“Thorstad was a great strategist,”
said Andy Humm who represented
Dignity, the gay Roman
Catholics group, in the CLGR.
Many of the activists who joined
the LGBTQ rights movement following
David Thorstad died on August 1 at the age of 79.
the Stonewall riots learned
their organizing skills in other
movements, such as the women’s
movement, the anti-war movement,
the civil rights movement,
and other left causes. Thorstad
was no exception.
Born and raised in Minnesota,
Thorstad attended the University
of Minnesota and graduated with
a bachelor’s and a master’s in
German and French. During college,
he joined the Youth Socialist
Alliance, a branch of the Socialist
Workers Party (SWP). In 1968,
he was an SWP candidate for a
congressional seat representing a
Minnesota district and he ran for
mayor of Minneapolis in 1969 on
the SWP line.
In 1967, Thorstad was “a member
of the Paris Secretariat of the
Bertrand Russell International
War Crimes Tribunal,” which was
investigating war crimes by the US
in Vietnam, and an “organizer of
the Twin Cities Socialist Workers
Party,” according to a 1969 issue of
The Militant, an SWP publication.
Thorstad was also active in opposing
the American war in Vietnam.
After arriving in New York City,
Thorstad found himself on Sixth
Avenue watching the 1970 march
that fi rst commemorated the 1969
Stonewall riots. He joined the LGBTQ
movement soon after, though
he continued to be involved in the
PROVIDED BY AUGUST BERNADICOU, THE LGBTQ HISTORY PROJECT
SWP until he broke with that organization
in 1973 over its continued
intransigence on backing what
Thorstad called the gay liberation
movement. (Thorstad would bristle
at Gay City News using LGBTQ in
this article.) The SWP had lifted its
ban on homosexuals in the party
in 1970, but continued to debate
its relationship with the gay liberation
movement for three years.
“You still cling to your conception
of the socialist revolution being
an essentially heterosexual
revolution — made of, by, and for
heterosexual workers,” Thorstad
wrote in a 1973 letter in which he
resigned from the party. “You fear
that too close an identifi cation of
the revolutionary party with gay
liberation will alienate it from the
(heterosexual) masses and interfere
with its ability to lead the socialist
revolution.”
In addition to his political work,
Thorstad participated in developing
LGBTQ history. He co-authored
“The Early Homosexual Rights
Movement (1864-1935)” with John
Lauritsen and wrote “Gay Liberation
and Socialism: Documents
From the Discussions on Gay Liberation
Inside the Socialist Workers
Party (1970-1973).”
Thorstad’s fall from politics came
in 1978 when he co-founded the
North American Man Boy Love Association
(NAMBLA) with roughly
30 other men. NAMBLA advocated
for an end to age of consent laws. It
argued that consent was possible
in the relationships it argued for.
“We wanted to part of a broader
sexual liberation movement
in which our issue was part of a
broader issue,” Thorstad said in
a 2005 interview with Gay City
News. “In hindsight, it may look
unrealistic and it certainly was
unrealistic.”
While Thorstad never had an interest
in having sex with children
— some NAMBLA members did
have that interest — he saw sex
between older and younger men as
something that had been part of
gay culture for millennia and was
inherently good.
“I can say categorically that
David was not a pedophile,” said
Phil Willkie, the former publisher
of The James White Review, a gay
men’s literary quarterly, who was
friends with Thorstad for 40 years.
“He was a what I would call a pederast.”
NAMBLA was described by the
mainstream press and law enforcement
as a group of child molesters,
a representation it could
never change in the minds of most
of the public, including many in
the LGBTQ community.
NAMBLA was banned from
meeting in New York City’s Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual & Transgender
Community Center in 1985 and
from holding a conference there,
which would have featured a poetry
reading by Allen Ginsberg,
in 1989. NAMBLA conducted its
meetings and conferences openly
to the point that law enforcement
agencies could easily track
the group’s activities, but repeated
raids by law enforcement on
NAMBLA members’ homes, which
rarely if ever led to criminal cases,
and continued bad press ended the
group. Today, it exists solely as a
website.
In his email, Ault wrote that “The
late Howard Wallace, a comrade of
Thorstad’s in the SWP…remarked
that Thorstad made a strategic
➤ THORSTAD, continued on p.19
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