Thorstad was also active in Trotskyist politics for some years. For more than six years, he 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. In June 1973, Thorstad and John Lauritsen published The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, 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. In 1977, David founded the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
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 caseCurley 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 ... plays on the impression people have always had of homosexuals as being child molesters", and describes opposition to NAMBLA as "... 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 senseKinsey'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.
The Early Homosexual Rights Movement New York; Times Change Press, 1974 with John Lauritsen
, editor, : Thorstad,
No apologies: the unauthorized publication of internal discussion documents of the Socialist Workers Party concerning lesbian/gay male liberation. Part 2, 1975-79 editor, ; New York 1980
Le Gay Voyage: Guide et regard homosexuels sur les grandes métropoles interviewee, ; Paris : Albin Michel, 1980
A Witchhunt foiled: the FBI vs. NAMBLA New York : North American Man/Boy Love Association, 1985
