Douglas Whaley

When I decided to move to Florida for three months at the beginning of 2013 the question I planned to ask myself at the end of the period was whether the snowbirding experience was good enough that I’d be willing to do it again in 2014.   But midway into the second month I found myself asking myself a very different question: did I want to move to the Fort Lauderdale area permanently? At that same point if I’d have asked myself to rate the visit on a scale of one to ten the answer would have been “ twelve .”   Why was the answer that high? Wilton Manors, Florida, where I was living is an almost exclusively gay environment.   Before moving here, like everybody else straight or gay, I’d lived only in an almost exclusively straight environment.   It was a shock seeing men casually kissing each other on the street as old friends met, and finding restaurants filled predominantly with tables full of men, laughing and talking, obviously having a grand gay time.   It’s all very liberat

. Nottingham, England I’ve done bookreadings from my atheist thriller, “Imaginary Friend” (available both on Amazon and Kindle) in four different states (Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Florida, with Kentucky to be added next month) but yesterday was a first: a reading in Nottingham. England!   Since I’m currently snowbirding in Wilton Manors, Florida, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, the ability to connect in this way across an ocean is a first rate marvel. It took some experimentation ahead of time to make sure it would work, and that the Secular Society of Nottingham was able to project my image up on a screen, but in the end there were no glitches.   There was about a three second delay between when I said something and the audience reacted, and I had to learn to adjust for that.   Before I figured that out I thought my jokes were falling flat.   I did my usual half hour reading, which consists of two selections from the novel having the most to do with atheism (and none of