Opening doors to Latino, LGBTQ health in Sacramento’s Lavender Heights
Opening doors to vital information and care while combating stigma.
Sacramento LGBT Community Center and the Latino Leadership Council sought to do both at a Sunday health fair in midtown Sacramento’s Lavender Heights neighborhood.
For a Latino LGBTQ community that battles with both access to health care and lingering stigma over sexual identity, having a place where health, culture and identity intersect was key to Sunday’s event, said Anita Campo Peralta, the LGBT center’s community resource and outreach coordinator.
The center’s fair in tandem with the Latino Leadership Council offered screenings Sunday for sexually transmitted infections, HIV testing and Mpox vaccines along with information from a number of health and community organizations.
“It’s one thing to be a queer person. It’s also another to be a queer Latino. It’s essential for all queer folks and straight folks to be educated on health, to be up to date on their health testing.” Campo Peralta said. “It’s especially important to the center and to me to reach as many folks so we can hit as many marginalized communities as possible and bring them the human rights that they deserve in terms of health and wellness.”
Nationally, Hispanic/Latino people age 13 and older represented 18% of the population but accounted for 25% of people with HIV, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The prevalence of new infections “shows that effective prevention and treatment are not adequately reaching people who could benefit most,” the department states.
Access to health care generally also poses challenges to the community, health researchers say.
Latino Californians have more difficulty finding a physician and are more likely to contract and die from Covid-19, for instance, the California Health Care Foundation said, citing research. The largest racial/ethnic group in the state, only 6% of the state’s physicians are Latino.
More than 4 in 10 — 42% — say their community does not have enough primary care providers to serve their health care needs, according to the foundation.
“In the Latino community, sometimes there is a language barrier, (so) there’s a disparity — they don’t get the opportunity to get those Spanish-speaking medical physicians,” said Julia Figueroa, a Latino Leadership Council youth community health worker.
“Having this health fair and being able to have our resources out there, not just for the Latino community but to the whole community, the queer community, the whole community of Sacramento, we have the opportunity to say, ‘We have these resources for you. Come find us. We’ll help guide you through this,” Figueroa said.
Add societal stigma, lack of family support or difficulty in talking about sexual health with loved ones and many in the Latino LGBTQ community put off care or treatment.
Events like Sunday’s are helping to change that, said Mario Lopez, a technician at Wellspace Health.
“More than anything, it’s a recognition that there is a destigmatization of sexual health, being comfortable speaking about it,” Lopez said. “We’re really just flipping the script.”
This story was originally published March 23, 2024 at 9:00 PM.
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