Rosanna Herber, the first openly-LGBTQ person to serve on the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s board, was honored as a Grand Marshal at this year’s Sacramento Pride March. The march coincides with June being LGBTQ Pride Month.
Herber first came to Sacramento in 1986. She grew up the middle sister of 13 children in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
When living in Fort Wayne, she got a job as the citizen’s advocate for the mayor’s office. Essentially, it was her job to help the citizens of Fort Wayne to solve their problems. She said what finally spurred her to California was when the mayor at that time had promised to declare a Gay Pride Day for Fort Wayne. According to her, the mayor went back on his promise at the last minute, to the anger of activists like Herber who helped advocate for a Gay Pride Day.
Herber was the one the mayor sent to tell the group of activists that it wasn’t going to happen. She had been saving money to move, but that was the deciding factor.
“I brought all those people back to the mayor’s office and said, ‘if you have questions, you can ask the mayor,’” Herber said. “Then I walked out and quit my job and I’ve never been back.”
She decided to move to California because she thought it would be more accepting of her as a lesbian. But the decision to move to Sacramento specifically was a little more pragmatic.
“I came to Sacramento because a woman had a spare bedroom she said I could rent,” Herber said. “Then I noticed that Sacramento was a lot like Fort Wayne –three rivers, it’s a city of trees, a city of churches … it’s small enough that you can know the local leaders and have impact and influence on them.”
A clipping of an article written about Rosanna Herber’s move to California from Fort Wayne.Courtesy of SMUD
Living in California was difficult. She didn’t have any friends, or a car, and she had trouble finding a job. Herber said she started talking to people, asking how to connect with the LGBTQ community in Sacramento at that time.
“Everybody that I talked to said, ‘Oh, go talk to Linda Birner. She does the newspaper and you’ll love her,’” Herber said.
Linda Birner was the creator and editor-in-chief of “Mom… Guess What?”, Sacramento’s first LGBTQ focused newspaper. The paper started in 1978 in response to community organizing efforts surrounding an effort to remove openly-gay teachers from schools. It was all volunteer-run, and it's how she first got connected with Sacramento’s LGBTQ community.
“It was neat to hang out with creative people who knew what was going on and who wanted to be a part of it,” Herber said. “I was willing to do anything for [Birner], she really was an icon who changed the face of the community with her newspaper.”
Herber said she wore a number of hats for “Mom… Guess What?”, including writing stories, helping laying out the design of the newspaper and even delivering them.
“Before, we didn’t have a good way to communicate, and we didn’t know what other people were doing,” Herber said. “Once she started publishing that paper, it legitimized our community.”
In 1988 she got a job offer to be chief of staff for Kim Mueller, who served on the Sacramento City Council from 1987 to 1992. Herber told Mueller she was worried her sexuality might be an issue.
“I said, ‘Well, I just want you to know that some people might not be happy about that, and I don’t want that to hurt you,’” Herber recalled. “She looked at me square in the eye and said, ‘Rosanna, I think you have a bigger problem with this than I do.’”
Herber worked as Mueller’s chief of staff until Mueller decided to go to law school in 1992. When Mueller left Sacramento, Herber decided to apply for a position at SMUD in community relations.
While at SMUD, she started the organization’s first LGBTQ employees’ group. Herber said she started learning about power and infrastructure, and became fascinated with it, coming from working in politics.
“Power changes the world, whether it’s electricity or political power,” Herber said. “When I came to Sacramento, I wanted to be out, I wanted to be myself. I wanted to bring my full self to my work.”
She worked at SMUD as an employee for 20 years in various capacities, even helping to develop a handbook for communities looking to start their own public utilities.
She retired from SMUD in 2012 and didn’t stay idle for long. She worked to get Steve Hansen, the first openly-gay city councilmember in Sacramento, elected to his seat.
“It was wonderful to have people like [Herber], people who were community elders at that time circle around me and help,” Hansen said. “She knocked on a lot of doors. She made a lot of phone calls. She’s a tireless person.”
Hansen said that older people in the LGBTQ community are especially important due to the toll the AIDS epidemic had on the community.
“There’s a huge swath of people that should have been a part of our community’s leadership growth, maturation that just died,” Hansen said. “Particularly the lesbians and the women in the community were some of the continuity… Whether it was [Herber] or a variety of other people, they helped us know who we were and where we came from, what we had fought for, what we had earned.”
Rosanna Herber sits in a car in the 2026 Sacramento Pride March, where she was honored as a Grand Marshal on June 14, 2026.Photo courtesy of SMUD
Also in 2012, she was asked to be on the Sacramento LGBT Center’s board. At that time, the center was struggling. David Heitstuman, the center’s current CEO, said that despite it being in existence for more than 25 years at that point, it had always been right on the edge of collapse. He joined the center’s board in 2011.
“My first board meeting was about whether or not the organization was going to be able to continue to be open in about eight weeks,” Heitstuman said. “At the end of [2011], they couldn’t pay the executive director that the board had just hired a few weeks ago.”
Heistuman said that Herber was brought on to help stabilize the center.
“It was just too much of a risk to not have a presence in Sacramento that people could come to and know they were going to be loved and cared about,” Herber said.
Herber’s connections built over a career of connecting with Sacramento’s business leaders helped secure regular donations to maintain operating costs. Heitstuman said that this new board helped get the center to a place where it didn’t need to be saved every few years.
“The center [had] floated around in the neighborhood to four or five different locations. In almost every case, they couldn’t pay the rent and would get kicked out,” Heitstuman said. “Establishing a permanent home that was fully paid for was really one of my very early goals.”
Herber helped pull in donations for the $5 million needed to purchase the center’s current home, a step up from the $6,000 in the bank when Heitstuman first joined the board.
In 2018, Herber was elected for the first time to the SMUD board of directors, after the previous board member for Ward 4 stepped down from re-election and asked Herber to run. When she was elected, she became the first LGBTQ person to ever serve on the board of directors.
Herber said that she believes representation is important, even when it comes to something like power infrastructure.
“We need more gay elected officials… If you're at the table, you can make a difference. You can make sure your community is not left out,” Herber said. “Every LGBTQ home has electricity, and if you have an issue, SMUD wants to know about it. I’m here to make sure that the LGBTQ community is treated fairly.”
Herber said she’s seen a change in recent years when it comes to representation and visibility, especially with the rise of the Trump administration.
“The existing president has really hurt our community. He’s made it okay to shy away from diversity, equity and inclusion.” Herber said. “If you look at the Pride Parade this year, there were several large companies who decided not to be sponsors again. SMUD was not one of them.”
She said that with the recent legislative and administrative targeting of transgender people in the United States, it might feel like queer rights are on a negative trajectory. Herber said that in her experience, these things move in cycles.
“For a long time, gay people were not accepted. Then, things shifted. We were able to get married, we were able to stand proud,” Herber said.”Now, with the visibility of transgender people, the whole cycle is starting again.”
Herber expressed solidarity with the transgender community, and that Sacramento is a place where she’s seen real change happen.
“All of us gay people are behind you. Once people get to know you, they’re going to love you, too. But it takes a while to change people’s minds,” Herber said. “I think Sacramento is one of the better places where we have had success in changing people’s minds.”
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