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