David Thorstad

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.

He described opposition to NAMBLA as "... [similar] to one waged by 'lesbian feminists who jumped right on the bandwagon' of what he called the anti-gay male/child pornography scare", according to The Advocate.

[16] He also likened being a pederast in the United States to being "a Jew in Nazi Germany" and criticized the mainstream LGBT community for its assimilationist approach towards capitalist and heterocentric society.

"[14] He also maintained 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.