Name David Thorstad | ||
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Full Name () 6 June 1941 (age 74) Known for Pro-pedophile activism with NAMBLA Movement Socialism, gay liberation, Pro-pederast and pro-pedophile activism, Age of consent reform | ||
Atheist pedophile supporters part 2: David Thorstad co-founder of NAMBLA
David Thorstad (born June 6, 1941) is an American political activist engaged with pro-pederast and pro-pedophile activism within the North American Man/Boy Love Association (commonly known as NAMBLA), of which he was a founding member. He was also a former president of New York's Gay Activists Alliance.
Contents
- Atheist pedophile supporters part 2 David Thorstad co founder of NAMBLA
- Early activism
- NAMBLA and pro pedophile activism
- Writings
- References
Thorstad describes himself as a bisexual pederast and Pentecostal who has "never been charged with violating any sex laws".
Early activism
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 (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). In the early 1970s Thorstad was president of the Gay Activists Alliance, a leading gay liberation group in New York.
In June 1973 Thorstad and John Lauritsen published The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935), a fourteen-page historical survey in the SWP internal Discussion Bulletin which attempted to prove that the gay liberation movement had a long and substantial history, particularly in Germany. This 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. The book was translated into Spanish and German.
NAMBLA and pro-pedophile activism
In 1978 Thorstad was a founding member of NAMBLA, "served as a member of the Steering Committee from some undetermined time until September 1996" and 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.
Thorstad claims that pederasty is the main way in which homosexuality has been expressed in modern culture, 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", and describes opposition to NAMBLA as "... [similar] to one waged by 'lesbian feminists who jumped right on the bandwagon' of what he calls the anti-gay male/child pornography scare", according to The Advocate. He has also likened being a pederast in the United States as the equivalent of being "a Jew in Nazi Germany" and has criticized the mainstream LGBT community for its assimilationist approach towards capitalist and heterocentric society. He has also 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." He also believes 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."
Summaries of Thorstad's views appear in his articles "Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement" in Male Intergenerational Intimacy: Historical, Socio-Psychological and Legal Perspectives, and "Homosexuality and the American Left: The Impact of Stonewall," in Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left.