VICE
by Jesse Ward
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. …