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Don was a key member of the WildFyre Society, creating, organizing, and helping run many events and serving on the Board of Directors of the club as Membership Director. Don brought a special touch to that role, focusing his attention at events on new members to set them at ease and make them feel at home. He was uniquely qualified by inclination, temperament, and experience to be the welcoming face of the WildFyre Society. His colleagues on the WildFyre Board are overwhelmed by his loss. Born into a military family, Don lived in many places
while growing up, but spent much of his adult life in Arkansas,
Georgia, and Texas, settling approximately five years ago in Fort
Lauderdale. A graduate of the University of Arkansas with a degree in
marketing, he worked many years in various aspects of customer service
at Delta Airlines, but found his true professional calling as a massage
therapist. Don combined his multimodal training, winsome personality, and sense
of life's pleasure to build a successful therapeutic practice,
confidently transplanting it to South Florida and developing a loyal
clientele primarily through word of mouth. Of course, one of Don's great passions was organized gay
social nudism, on which he had a tremendous impact. Attending the Annual
International Gathering of Male Naturists, sponsored by Gay Naturists
International (GNI), for the first time in 1993, Don and his buddies from
Dallas yearned to bring home the deep camaraderie that they
had experienced at the retreat in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.
Don became one of the founders of Dallas Area Male Naturists (DAMN),
which is going strong a decade later, with much of the structure and policy
that he devised still in place. Don kept returning each year to the GNI Gathering and
getting more involved in the event. As his knowledge and experience
grew, he was elected to the GNI Board of Directors in the late 1990s and
became GNI's official liaison to gay naturist clubs. Don wrote articles and
hosted seminars on club management and development and cheerfully
dispensed advice to new and existing clubs to help them grow and prosper. The
marked proliferation and blossoming of local clubs in the new century has
been aided by Don's gentle nurturing. In recent years, Don also served as
Treasurer of GNI. The WildFyre Society had a genesis at the 1998 GNI
Gathering similar to that of the Dallas group a few years earlier,
so it was logical for Don to join the WildFyre Board of Directors when he
moved to Florida, taking charge of the membership function for his new
local club, which was still in its formative stage. The WildFyre
Society's spectacular expansion took off as soon as he became involved.
Under Don's tutelage, it grew within five years from
fewer than 200 members to be the largest local or regional gay naturist club
in the world, with more than 1,200 members. Thanks to Don, the organization
was able to maintain a personal feel despite its rapid growth.
Don's role at the GNI Gathering continued to expand as
Club Liaison. In addition to his GNI Board responsibilities, Don conducted
the opening ceremony each year, featuring the Parade of Clubs. As he
introduced each club while members proudly marched across the stage and
down the runway behind their banner, he would regale the audience with an
astonishing recitation of facts and figures, dates, personalities, and
anecdotes for that group, all from memory. Don also deftly hosted
Club Day each year, facilitating a nuts-and-bolts workshop for club
officers to hone their leadership skills and get help with
organizational problems. As Chairman of the GNI Events Committee, Don oversaw
efforts to develop additional events besides GNI's signature summer
Gathering. Although there were several disappointments as prospective deals
for winter/spring events at hotel-based resorts in warm-weather locales
did not pan out, Don kept after every contact to explore all possible
angles, and remained unfazed by these setbacks. He did have the
satisfaction of helping craft plans for GNI's first nude Windjammer cruise in
the Caribbean in 2004, on which he sailed, and seeing that success repeated
on a larger scale in March 2005, although he was chagrined to have
to cancel his participation in the second cruise at the last minute, due to
illness. Apart from his official GNI duties, Don was
coordinator of the infamous, "double-wide" Cabin A8, the last cabin
and popular stop-off along the main path leading to the disco at the GNI
Gathering. With its outrageous themes, over-the-top decorations, infinite
drag wardrobe, flowing bar, and nightly parties packed literally to the
rafters, the cabin became a Gathering institution, driven largely by
Don's instinctive hospitality and flair for the fabulously absurd.
Behind the scenes and long before the Gathering, Don would be hard at work to
round up previous cabin mates or to recruit new ones for the upcoming
retreat. In Florida between Gatherings, Don frequently hosted nude
soirées at his home to welcome visiting GNI members. A celebration of Don’s life was held on Saturday, May 7 at
the home of Michael, his neighbor, co-hosted by Eddie B., David (a/k/a
“Mona”), and the WildFyre Society. An additional remembrance will occur at
the 21st Annual GNI Gathering
in August 2005. Don requested that, in lieu of flowers, contributions be
made in his memory to Gay Naturists International (GNI), the American
Diabetes Association (ADA),
or the National Kidney Foundation (NKF). We invite those who knew him to share their
memories of Don and their feelings about what he meant to them by
signing our online memory book, Remembrances of Don King. Click on the book icon, below. Please join us in keeping Don and his bereaved family and friends in your prayers or meditations.
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