Editor’s Note
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available 24/7. Dial 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Dial 1-866-488-7386 for The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention hotline for LGBTQ+ youth. Dial 1-877-565-8860 to reach the Trans Lifeline, a suicide prevention hotline run by trans people for trans and questioning people.
Jasper Torres clasped two miniature flags with one hand, while shuffling through books written by LGBTQ+ authors with the other.
One flag, a light blue, white and pink-colored flag represented his transgender identity, while the other flag, a magenta, yellow and cyan-colored flag, denoted his pansexual identity.
The 13-year-old grasped the flags, even as he switched one hand to holding a microphone and addressed the roughly 50 attendants at Merced’s Pride flag-raising ceremony on June 9.
“I grew up with really accepting parents, and I am really grateful for that because I know some people don’t have that,” Torres said, acknowledging his parents’ presence in the audience.
“I have gone through a lot of things in my very short life, and I have changed gender and sexuality more times than I can count,” Torres said, eliciting laughs from the crowd. “I’m really happy that we get to raise this flag and have this community, so accepting of people and understanding of other people’s stories.”
Merced officials, LGBTQ+ organizations and community members on June 9 celebrated the hoisting of the Pride flag with a reception outside the Merced County Courthouse Museum in honor of Pride Month.
Staff from CalPride Valle Central led the commemoration of the fifth-annual raising of the Pride flag, which has flown over Bob Hart Square since June 1. Attendees have convened there in previous years but moved the event due to ongoing construction.
“Today, as we raise the Pride flag here in Merced, we do something simple, yet deeply powerful,” Katalina Zambrano, executive director at CalPride Valle Central, said at the ceremony.
Zambrano described the progress she’s seen for Merced’s LGBTQ+ residents, including herself. She left the county when there were no employment opportunities available for her, only to return as head of the CalPride center.
“We remind this city, this county, and this country, we are still here. We still stand. We are still fighting,” she said.
CalPride is a nonprofit organization providing free preventative health care, harm-reduction and gender-affirming resources in Merced County.
City officials, including Merced Mayor Matthew Serratto and Councilmembers Fue Xiong and Mike Harris, attended this year’s commemoration to demonstrate their support. Xiong and Harris represent City Council District 6 and District 3, respectively.
It’s been five years since Merced officially hosted its first Pride flag-raising ceremony in 2021 at Bob Hart Square. The city has consecutively done so since, an action that’s been met with opposition from residents along the way.
People who opposed raising the Pride flag mostly cited religious beliefs. That includes a police reform activist who took offense to being called cisgender and waved a religious flag during a 2023 Merced City Council meeting.
Natalie Leal, a transgender youth, took a different position on the Pride flag during a city council meeting this January, when the city council approved which flags the city would raise.
“With the thought of Pride, we have to remember that it was born out of struggle,” Leal said, moments before council members approved a request to fly the Pride flag in June.
Leal, the trans youth outreach specialist and peer advocate at CalPride Valle Central, said flying the Pride flag represents progress and a long-fought history of civil rights for LGBTQ+ communities.
“[Pride] was not just a celebration,” Leal said. “It was a fight for survival, for dignity and for equality. At the heart of this movement were people like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and many more Black and brown trans activists, who stood up against violence and systematic oppression.”
Leal spoke of Sylvia Rivera, a trans woman, activist and veteran of the Stonewall Uprising, a series of protests against police brutality in 1969 that catalyzed the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement in the U.S.
Stonewall was led by trans women of color, who have not generally savored the gains in equality the LGBTQ+ movement initially brought forward. Black trans women, for example, continue to face disproportionate acts of deadly violence and unemployment today. Trans people are furthermore being explicitly written out of history by the federal government, which only recognizes male and female sexes assigned at birth.
While Merced County has progressed in terms of visibility for its LGBTQIA+/2S communities – several businesses downtown display Pride flags in their windows year-round – Merced’s queer-identified residents say they continue to advocate for their basic needs and general safety.
“Marriage equality is definitely not something that’s on the top of my priority list,” said Tsim Nuj, a queer-identified Mercedian. “I’m really prioritizing, how do queer and trans folks have secure housing and safe spaces? Are they able to meet their basic needs?”
The Merced FOCUS is identifying Tsim Nuj and others in this article by first-name only since they expressed concern for their safety as LGBTQ+ Merced residents.
A history of LGBTQ+ rights in Merced County
Merced has seen steady leadership from lesbians and gay people throughout the decades.
The region’s first same-sex marriage, back in 1976, was between two women.
Jo Ann Martinez and Yolanda Daniel were married in Atwater on Jan. 16, 1976, making their union the first recorded same-sex marriage in Merced County, according to newspaper archives provided by historian Sarah Lim, museum director at the Merced County Courthouse Museum.
Although the Merced County Clerk’s Office issued the couple a marriage license, the relationship was termed invalid two weeks later when the County Counsel’s Office said the county could not overrule state and federal law.
“The county cannot create something that cannot be created under law,” Russell Koch, the county counsel at the time, said. Same-sex marriage wasn’t declared legal in California and in the United States until 2013 and 2015 respectively.
Although Martinez and Daniel’s marriage was nullified, Merced’s same-sex couples tried for marriage again in June 2008, during the state’s intervening lift on a gay marriage ban that resulted in the first issued same-sex marriage licenses in the county, the Merced Sun-Star reported.
Kathy Hunter and Polly Bernardo were one of the first same-sex couples immediately married in Merced County.
Unlike 1976, these marriages were not nullified, but they did trigger opposition from county residents who rallied in support of Proposition 8, a measure on the November 2008 ballot that sought to amend the state constitution’s definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. A majority of California voters and 71% of Merced County residents approved the proposition, which was overturned five years later in 2013.
Merced County in 2011 welcomed its first openly-gay legislator, Cathleen Galgiani. The then-Livingston Democrat told The Stockton Record in an interview that she hadn’t accepted her sexuality until well into adulthood and hoped her coming out sent a message of hope for youth struggling to come to terms with their own sexual identity.
“There was a really strong, queer culture here 15 years ago,” said Eli Sachse, co-founder of LGBTQ Merced, a chapter organization promoting the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ communities in the Central Valley.
He personally viewed Merced County as once being “the lesbian capital of the Central Valley.”
Sachse, who worked as a bartender at that time, said local dive bars such as The Partisan, Bud’s Place and the now-closed R Bar, employed several lesbian bartenders, which created spaces for LGBTQ+ communities to meet.
“It was this little bubble of culture,” he said.
Spaces of belonging as ‘lifelines’
While there may have been pockets of supportive community in the past, Merced LGBTQ+ residents said the need for services for the region’s queer and trans residents remains acute.
Before Zambrano became the executive director of CalPride Valle Central, she battled substance abuse as a transgender youth in Merced County.
Now in recovery, Zambrano understands how detrimental it is for the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ youth and adults to lack access to supportive spaces.
“Not having a safe space to go and say, ‘I need help. I need to talk to somebody. I need a hygiene kit. Who do I talk to about hating my life and where I’m at?,’” she said. “Not having that because I was trans, and then being in a conservative area.”
It’s the reason she tried methamphetamine for the first time at 15 years old.
With research demonstrating the LGBTQ+ community’s heightened vulnerability to mental illness, substance abuse and homelessness, queer Merced residents emphasized the need for spaces where they feel safe to co-exist.
Dozens of LGBTQ+ groups in Merced have formed in the past two decades to support community members, including collaborations between government, grassroots and nonprofit organizations.
But not all of them have been stable or consistent. Some organizations have endured or undergone name and leadership changes, while others have dissolved.
Merced PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Gays and Lesbians), a national network of LGBTQ+ rights advocates, regularly used a former LGBTQ+ Community Center as a meeting point. The local chapter was founded in 2006 by retired teacher David Hetland, and has since disbanded.
In 2014, Merced established its first city-funded, brick-and-mortar LGBTQ+ resource space. The opening of the now-defunct LGBT Community Center at 1744 G St. was historic, the Merced Sun-Star reported, but closed only three years later in 2017, with officials citing funding and staffing issues.
“I worry about sustainability,” said Sachse, who now works as a registered nurse for the county’s Human Services Agency (HSA).
The 45-year-old Petaluma native explained that LGBTQ+ communities in Merced need accessible spaces to exist. “Otherwise, people are just isolated and afraid,” he said.
Sachse emphasized the need for a center that’s inclusive of community members who are unhoused and in recovery from substance abuse. He worries recent cuts in federal funding under President Donald Trump will further threaten Merced’s ability to sustain such a place.
“A center that’s inclusive, sober and open on the weekends,” he said, adding, “There’s so many people in our community who are in recovery.”
Six years after the LGBTQ+ center’s closure, CalPride (formerly Somos Familia Valle Central) opened its doors in 2023 at 710 W. 18th St. to provide comprehensive resources for LGBTQ+ community members. Rebranded in 2024, it is one of three regional organizations sharing the same name, the other two being CalPride Stanislaus and CalPride Sierras.
All of the center’s services are free. Services include a mentorship program for transitioning youth and adults, testing for sexually transmitted infections and HIV, and legal assistance for undocumented transgender residents who need help changing their name on government identification documents.
“For many in the LGBTQ+ community, finding such a space is like discovering a lifeline,” the collective’s website states.
Measuring a community’s sense of safety
In the past five years, the Merced Police Department documented six hate incidents targeting the LGBTQ+ community, according to Merced Police Chief Steven Stanfield.
Of those, three were classified as a hate crime because the homophobic f-slur was used during an assault.
“When I read these reports, a lot of it is verbal abuse,” said Stanfield, who reported one of the incidents himself.
The case involved the arrest of two men who attempted to tear down the Pride flag at Bob Hart Square last June.
Stanfield said the men were charged with a hate crime and breaking city property because “…We own that flagpole. That’s the city’s property they broke,” he said.
Additionally, the Merced County Sheriff’s Office documented three hate incidents in the past year targeting the LGBTQ+ community, according to a department spokesperson.
Again, the same homophobic slur recorded in the Merced Police Department’s reports was used in all three cases.
The hate crime numbers for the city of Merced represent an increase in reported cases targeting LGBTQ+ communities, including no incidents reported in 2020 and 2021, one in 2022, two in 2023 and three in 2024.
Although few hate incidents and hate crimes targeting the county’s LGBTQ+ community were reported in the past five years, queer-identified Merced residents – many of whom are residents of color – say they struggle to feel safe.
“Being queer, you kind of know that this world isn’t built for you,” said Ale, an organizer with Young Revolutionary Front, a grassroots collective prioritizing mutual aid and political education as models of organizing for social justice.
Ale, who migrated from Mexico and lived in different California cities as a youth, remembered being made to feel different and intimidated wherever he went.
“Before I knew who I was, or before I knew who I liked and what I didn’t like, it seemed like the rest of the world already knew,” the 29-year old Mercedian said.
Ale described people’s reactions to the energy he carried as a queer child as violent, with instances of people throwing homophobic slurs at him and words he didn’t understand, and from which he couldn’t defend himself.
“A lot of our folks get killed…and go through a lot of violence and displacement. (It’s) a sign and a warning that we’re not allowed to take up space in this world because it’s not ours,” they said. “The system itself is not built for us. It’s not built for our identities and our spirits.”
Improving LGBTQ+ community’s access to basic needs in Merced County
When Eli Sachse was coming of age in the 1980s, no one but him understood he was a boy.
“I remember distinctly thinking that I, at 7 (years old) or something, should have a little boy’s body,” he said. “And then, immediately thinking, clearly this means I’m a pervert, and I can’t tell anybody, ever.”
Sachse transitioned medically at 35 years old, which is later in life than he would have wanted. A bisexual trans man, Sachse explained that it wasn’t a shortage of desire that delayed his transition, but rather health care disparities among LGBTQ+ communities.
“The main barriers are stigma,” he said. Sachse described leaving Merced 10 years ago because there were no primary health care providers offering gender-affirming care in the county. “There’s so many barriers,” he said.
In his work at LGBTQ Merced, Sachse provides referrals to gender-affirming resources and educates medical students about gender-affirming health care through the organization’s partnership with UC Merced.
“People are afraid to even ask for care now,” he said. “People think that it’s illegal already to do trans care right now, actually, because of Trump.”
Currently, 26 states across the country have legislated bans on gender-affirming care for youth, according to the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), a nonprofit organization that tracks national anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in real time.
The most recent ruling is the Supreme Court’s June 18 decision to uphold Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming health care for its LGBTQ+ youth.
California is not one of those states and adopted the Transgender, Gender Diverse, and Intersex (TGI) Inclusive Care Act in 2023, which protects gender-affirming care for youth and adults.
“In California, we will continue to promote and protect access to healthcare, not restrict it,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in response to the ruling. “My office and I remain committed to safeguarding and upholding the healthcare rights and freedoms for all individuals, including our transgender youth.”
The FOCUS found one primary care provider in Merced County who currently practices gender-affirming health care at Golden Valley Health Centers.
Merced County’s local Medi-Cal health plan has 22 provider groups offering gender-affirming health care services in the county, according to a Central California Alliance for Health (CCAH) spokesperson.
The FOCUS reached out to the county’s Department of Public Health and the state’s Department of Health Care Services about available options for gender-affirming care providers in the county. Neither agency had information available on current gender-affirming health care services in Merced County.
Additionally, national data shows that LGBTQ+ communities are disproportionately affected by housing insecurity, according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“Housing feels really important at the moment,” said Tsim Nuj, a Merced native living with their parents in a housing situation they described as complex.
Both Hmong and nonbinary, Tsim Nuj said they feel they have to compromise their authenticity to live with their parents.
“It’s hard to kind of navigate that, navigate my ethnic community,” the 24-year-old educator said. “I just feel like sometimes, I don’t really feel accepted. Those are some things that I’m kind of working through.”
The reality is evident among LGBTQ+ youth, who make up one-third of unaccompanied unhoused youth nationwide, the Merced Union High School District’s (MUHSD) website states. They often are leaving unsupportive households to escape emotional and physical danger.
For many children, school can be a haven from conflict at home.
But for Amanda Sandoval, high school was a “horrible” experience that led to a civil lawsuit against Merced Union High School District (MUHSD) in 2006. The lawsuit was later settled out of court, Sandoval told the FOCUS.
Sandoval, a Mexican-American trans woman, said the lawsuit addressed incidents such as one in which a group of high school boys physically assaulted her, removed her clothes and put her in a trash can.
Nhia Yang, an asexual nonbinary resident, also attended school in Merced and remembered needing more LGBTQ+ representation and education while earning an education in the city’s public school system.
“Back when I was in high school, when we were in our health classes, they weren’t talking about how intimacy looks like for people who are queer, or talking about how queer people are more susceptible to mental health issues or to suicide,” Yang said.
“The issues that affect us are not being talked about in schools or in public places at all.”
The scarcity in representation and inclusion in school contributed to their symptoms of anxiety and depression, Yang said. “When I was a youth in Merced, I didn’t see a future for myself as a queer person.”
The FOCUS reached out to MUHSD and Merced City School District (MCSD) about available resources for their LGBTQ+ students and staff.
“Merced City School District is committed to equal opportunity for all individuals,” an MCSD spokesperson said, adding that the district monitors STOPit, an online reporting system allowing students and employees to anonymously report discriminatory-based behavior.
An MUHSD spokesperson said the district currently offers counseling services and referrals for its general student body, including LGBTQ+ students.
Valley LGBTQ+ community ‘building new worlds’
The term “queer” has historically evolved from a slur used against LGBTQ+ people to a statement of pride reclaimed by many in the community.
“(The word queer) means us recognizing ourselves as pivotal change-makers in our communities,” said Meche, an organizer with Young Revolutionary Front, adding that their queer identity is a political identity.
In 2018, a study found that queer-identified people were more likely to be activists and linked the fact to their experiences as marginalized communities.
Meche said they believe LGBTQ+ individuals in Merced are leaders in transforming the quality of life for underserved communities, such as LGBTQ+ individuals, unhoused residents, people of color, and those experiencing mental illness.
“Our community should know that, as homophobic as they are and they can be, they should know that the folks on the ground creating alternative structures in this really violent place are queer people – because we are uninvited from the general world, so we’re really trying to create differently for ourselves,” Ale of Young Revolutionary Front said. “We’ve dedicated a lot of our lives to building new worlds.”
One way the group is reimagining safety is through their free community closet. Volunteers at the weekly pop-up event at 1742 Canal St. encourage locals, a portion of them unhoused community members, to stop, rest, hydrate, snack and browse through clothes – free of charge.
Tsim Nuj is reenvisioning dance by facilitating “Free Flow,” a social event where people focus on moving the body with intention through poetry, stretching, music, exercise and art.
“I think about Free Flow being a space where we get to be free, and what does it mean for queer people to feel free in their bodies?” Tsim Nuj said. “I’m also thinking about how do we use dance as a way to build community and also as a way to liberate our people? And not everybody, not every dancer is doing that work.”
In the process of creating safer and equitable futures, Merced’s LGBTQ+ youth and adults continue to emerge proud and visible.
Jasper Torres reports feeling welcomed at school, where he and his girlfriend are an openly LGBTQ+ couple.
“It’s cool that the younger generations are being more accepting, and that they’re more open to sharing their identities and visibly expressing themselves in public,” Yang said.
