Pete Sferra was wearing a baseball cap, thick tortoiseshell glasses, a bandana and sneakers when I met him at Jane Warner Plaza on the corner of Castro and Market.
Sferra, now 71, has been a nudist for more than 50 years, and has been hanging out at the plaza for nearly a decade with about a dozen other unclothed “regulars.” But it wasn’t his clothing (or lack thereof) that drew me to him. He just seemed like an interesting guy.
Unsurprisingly, Sferra is no stranger to attention, and he has frequently voiced his defense of nudity to the media, earning special notice when, unclothed, he helped a tourist being attacked in the Castro.
Tourists and locals alike often approach Sferra when he’s sitting bare in the plaza. Some want photos, some ask questions, some are shocked or critical, and some simply thank Sferra for preserving the city’s idiosyncratic culture. Sferra enjoys the company, but said he doesn’t do this to stand out.
“ I like blending in,” Sferra said. “Frankly, I could spend a whole day just hanging out and nobody would even notice me. That works for me.”
Sferra said he became a nudist at 19 after visiting a nude beach in San Diego, and “never looked back.”
Contrary to some onlookers’ misconceptions, however, Sferra has not spent his whole life undressed. Throughout his professional career as an illustrator and technical writer at a South Bay aerospace company, his office outfits were conventional.
He often kept it casual, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, though while he was never particularly fashion-conscious, Sferra said, he was “no slob,” either.
Sferra said that some people misunderstand nudists.
“ I’ve got a whole life,” Sferra said. “People are surprised to find out that I was married twice, both times to women, I have two daughters and two grandsons, and I worked for 40 years. The other thing that they somehow miss is they assume that we’re naked all the time.”
Occasionally, people shout at him to put some clothes on. To that, Sferra offers a simple solution.
“ There’s lots of things I don’t want to look at, and guess what? I just don’t look,” he said.
But Sferra said that the nudists have a strong support base in the neighborhood. When then-supervisor Scott Wiener proposed a city-wide nudity ban in 2012, some clothed individuals protested along with the nudists.
The law went into effect in February 2013, requiring anyone in public to cover, at least, their genitals. Sferra now sports a bandana over his groin, but says that otherwise, “for a city that has a nudity ban, we do pretty well.”
Sferra and his other nudist friends still walk into local businesses and are served in the same way as other patrons. No shirt, no pants, no problem. Want to order a coffee from Philz at Castro and 18th streets wearing only sunglasses and a sequined penis covering? Great. Will that be oat milk or regular?
“They treat me like a normal person,” said Sferra. It’s because the Castro, a historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood, is home to diverse and accepting people, Sferra said.
“What we do is technically legal anywhere in the city of San Francisco, but you’re not going to see it in very many neighborhoods,” Sferra said.
“ I love this city, even with all of its problems, and I particularly love this neighborhood. There’s a lot of kindness. There are a lot of diverse, alternative lifestyle choices here: You’ll see drag queens, you’ll see trans people. I like that because, selfishly, we’re just passé. ‘Oh, the naked guys, no big deal.’”
That’s what Sferra hopes people take away from his presence: “No big deal.”
He wants to be remembered as somebody who tried to normalize nudity. And if he aims to achieve this goal by talking to people, then he seems to be on the right track. Just as I got up to say goodbye to Sferra, there was another person looking to strike up a conversation with the naked guy. Is that weird? Sferra doesn’t think so. Not in San Francisco.
“If you want a regular, run-of-the-mill city, they’re all over the country,” he said. “ Nothing makes me happier than when a local says, ‘Thanks, guys, keeping us real.’”
