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Couchsurfing.org is a website millions of people use to find host travelers and find homes to stay in for free when they travel, and Boone is one of Halifax's most popular hosts. Despite being ostracized around town, and even among some of the East Coast kink groups, through the service, Boone has served as ambassador to Nova Scotia to folks from France, Japan, Nepal, and more than 25 other countries.Anyone who comes over to Boone's house knows he's a nudist—he demands visitors express they're aware of this before they come over.But you will not see his dangling bits, or even the rooms of his home, on Couchsurfing.org.Any content deemed "sexually explicit, obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd," or "suggestive" is banned from appearing on the website, which means the only room that can appear in any of Boone's profile pictures is the living room—unless he does some serious redecorating.
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After you host or stay with someone through the Couchsurfing website, you can leave a positive, neutral, or negative reference with a message that ends up on their public profile. Boone has over 150 positive references and no negative ones, while he estimates over 500 strangers have stayed at his house in total.Alice, a 25-year-old traveler originally from Kolkata, India, stayed at Boone's for a weekend this January. "I pitched a really last-minute request on the Couchsurfing website, for a host, and Boone responded within a couple of minutes," she says via email. (She did not want me to use her real name for this article.) "His response was very candid, warm, and welcoming, which made me feel grateful and excited to meet with him."
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Next to the guest room is Boone's bedroom, where a rainbow of whips, handcuffs, and ropes hang off the girders joining the four eight-foot pillars of his massive bed. Years of living on a ship's two-by-six foot bed while serving in the Navy influenced Boone's affinity for king-size beds when on land.He was born and raised in Corner Brook in Newfoundland and Labrador—which was just Newfoundland while he was there. His father was a generous bus and taxi driver who sometimes brought needy patrons home for meals. He died when Boone was seven. Boone and his two sisters never had to keep secrets from their mother. He attributes his own openness to her welcoming attitude.
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Halifax does have a few societies dedicated to kink, but Boone doesn't keep close ties with them. He says many groups dedicated to BDSM are too elitist.
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Boone receives $50,000 a year through pensions and insurance policies. He's deemed unfit for work because of physical and psychological injuries he's sustained from his time in service.He suffers pain from injuries in his back and feet sustained from 27 years of wearing improper footwear on steel ships and jumping from those ships onto small boats.In 1998 he was on a ship responding to the aftermath of the Swissair Flight 111 crash off the shore of Peggy's Cove, where divers lifted parts of plane wreckage and human bodies from the ocean. Boone revisits the site not only in his nightmares but when he takes Couchsurfers to Peggy's Cove. It's one of the spots travelers most want to visit, and he has a story to tell them when they arrive.His only commitment is to be at Harbourview Weekend Market from 8 AM to 4 PM on Friday and Saturday, where he sells items that once occupied his house. He does odd-jobs sometimes. Otherwise, he's free to spend time with Couchsurfers. They get to see parts of Nova Scotia not mentioned in any tourist's guide, like Boone's nude spots in the woods.He's no longer in touch with anyone he served with in the Navy, where he always felt like an outsider.He says most people are programmed to be robots by the time they're 20, and he does what he wants, not what society wants him to do."I'm not willing to lower myself now to just living a life where I go to work, come home, go to work, come home," he says, now drinking a can of Coke and eating cold fish from a bowl."Go to work, have a family, go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, then they die. In Newfoundland, we knew a lot of our neighbors. I don't even know my neighbors. All you do is see people come home, go in, they don't talk to you."So, me? I like being open. I like getting to know people, and enjoying life, and that's the way I'll be. And a lot of people don't understand that."