Canada’s BDSM-Loving Nudist Ambassador Loves Couchsurfers

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

Wayne Boone's nude months run from June to December. You can wear clothes if you want when you visit him, but these are his nude months, and so he'll be naked—it says so right there on his Couchsurfing profile.

Strangers often find themselves in Boone's home in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia, for a couple days, a week, or longer—over the past seven years, he says, he's hosted more than 500 travelers.

Knock on his door and he'll greet you in a plush blue robe—to appease his neighbors. But once inside, the robe is off.

With Halifax being the most eastern major city in mainland Canada, and because Boone offers drives from the airport and train station to his home, this is the first Canadian house seen by many travelers.

In his living room, an eight-foot wooden cross with steel shackles leans against a wall holding two different dartboards with suggestions for sexual activities instead of points. The room is full of boxes of sex costumes and stacks of books on religion, home repair, gardening, travel, and the Royal Family. On one shelf, books on astrology and numerology sit behind pictures of his children and the four medals he received in the Navy. The room also features a $500 floor-mounted portable stripper pole.

"My neighbors just look at me [when] I'm going to a party—of course I take my stripper pole, I take my cross, I take my massage table and it's, 'Oh, the freak is going somewhere,'" he says with a shrug.

Boone, 55, has hair that is as gray and long as it will ever be. A whisper of brown in the mustache of his Santa beard jiggles when he speaks in his thick Newfie accent, punctuated with coughs from years of chain smoking.

His heavy, tanned body—he tries to spend four hours a day in the sun—is animated at any moment. Swiveling around, he points to the floor where a fabric chair with a rope and trapeze bar sits.

"This is, like—I have a love swing, this here. It's a portable thing that I can go and set it up in somebody's living room and hang in the love swing," he says.

Up the stairs past, a velvet samurai painting on the staircase ledge, I head into the room where the door's already open to reveal a gynecologist's table sprinkled with dildos and vibrators and something that looks like a nutcracker.

Speculums and doctor's tools lie on a table next to sex toys. Five candles are equally melted atop a shelf full of books on the human mind, health, dreams, relationships, the tarot, the I Ching, Native American culture, Wicca, and Buddhism.

"So, this is pretty much the only room I got open for Couchsurfers right now," he says.

Letting Almost All of It Hang Out
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.

But no sex gear is ever moved out of sight within the house—not when his daughter or son, both in their 20s, come over; not when his government-appointed cleaner shows up; not when new travelers arrive.

According to Boone, it's unfortunate that Couchsurfing hosts who are into bondage hide their gear when visitors come over. He thinks they're missing out on crucial opportunities to make potential kinky friends.

"You guys don't mention a word about BDSM, and you don't have any things out where they can see your stuff, it's like your mother and father are coming to visit, and you don't want 'em to know what you're up to," he says. "So if they don't know what you're doing, then how are you gonna know if they're kinky or interested in kink?

"You're not going to talk about it, so you expect them? 'Oh, could you tell me where the nearest nudist place is? Or the closest BDSM club is around here?'"

Rave Reviews
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."

Alice says her initial impression was that it looked like Boone lived in a thrift store converted into a house. "I can't say I wasn't overwhelmed, but it was his welcoming spirit, generosity and 'no judgments' attitude that put me at ease almost right away," she says.

Over two days they visited popular tourist spots around Halifax like Peggy's Cove and the Titanic Memorial while talking about topics like alternative medicine, women's rights, and nudist philosophy.

"I learned that I although I have never spent time with a nudist before, I was not in the least uncomfortable with Boone's nudity," says Alice. "Spending time at his house and experiencing his lifestyle offered me the opportunity to realize that I do not associate our human physicality with sexuality by default."

Shore-Leave Revelation
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.

He worked various jobs before enlisting in the Navy a year after graduating high school. Over 27 years, he advanced to the rank of leading seaman.

He says that while he was in the Navy, Europeans in foreign ports used a service called Dial-a-Sailor to meet Canadian sailors like him and his crew. They would be shown around town, taken out to dinner, and stay at local homes for the weekend—similar to what he does now through Couchsurfing.

His nudism started in the service, when a trip early in his military career took him to Jamaica.

After arguing lengthily with a man who tried to make Boone and some crewmates pay to visit a beach, they were told it was a topless beach—they quickly offered up $2 for entry and, from then on, Boone says he was "pretty well a nudist."

And the trip from nudist to BDSM wasn't that long.

"When I was a teenager, and when I was married and everything, sex was basically the same as everybody else thinks it was," Boone says. "In the bed. Open legs. Fuck, and come, and that was sex…"

He says that when he was in foreign ports, he'd learn more and more, but only started practicing BDSM after he was middle-aged and single. "And what I know now is basically 11 years of studying everything I could find and learn."

He sits on his living room couch, on top of a massive plush blanket plastered with imagery from the tarot.

"So now I teach people, you know, be open-minded. Don't be scared of things. You know, somebody tells you sex is supposed to be in the bedroom? Tell 'em to go fuck themselves. Have sex wherever you want."

Dealing with Whip Snobbery
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.

He recalls the time he was driving a group of Couchsurfers to Cape Breton, when he saw a leather store off the highway. He pulled the car over, entered the store, and bought all the spare scraps he could—only a few dollars a strip.

On the way back from the trip, he stopped at Home Depot to buy a four-foot plain wooden dowel. Affixing the strips to the dowel, he says he made his own whip for less than $40, while some professional BDSM practitioners in town pay upward of $300 for a custom whip.

When he brought this creation to a kink party, a woman said to Boone, "Your whip is fucking disgusting. Where did you get that?"

"I made it," he answered.

But his whip of wood and spare scraps of leather was laughed at, and Boone never returned to the Society of Bastet.

Feeling uncomfortable with the judgment in the BDSM scene, he's instead started relying on social networking to find partners. "So I just stay away from it all. If I wanna play, I find someone I wanna play with. That's it."

FetLife is a social networking site for fetishists. About 9,400 accounts are registered to the website's Halifax group, with a few thousand more in the rest of the province.

Boone's FetLife username is Sensual-Master, because he "loves sensual play and being a master." He's not much for poetry. His profile features a list of 54 different sexual activities he is interested in meeting people for, from "abduction play" to "whips."

The Welcoming Outsider
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."