David Thorstad (October 15, 1941 – August 1, 2021) was an American political activist who co-founded or ran a number of homosexual rights groups following the Stonewall riots in 1969, including as a former president of New York's Gay Activists Alliance. He later engaged in pedophilia and pederasty activism with the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), of which he was a founding member. Early activism Thorstad was 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 (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)" in the SWP internal Discussion Bulletin, attempting to prove that the gay liberation movement had a long and substantial history, particularly in Germany. This 14-page historical survey 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, Thorstad founded the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Pedophilia and pederasty activism Thorstad described himself as a bisexual pederast and atheist (a "recovered" Pentecostal) who had "never been charged with violating any sex laws". In 1978, he became a co-founder of NAMBLA, and "served as a member of the Steering Committee from some undetermined time until September 1996". He 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 claimed that "pederasty is probably historically the most common form of homosexuality in Western culture, as well as many other cultures", and that "child abuse hysteria is an industry of insanity aimed at homosexuals [which]