O.C. Gays Show ‘Who We Are’ at March : Civil rights: About 300 residents from ‘behind the Orange Curtain’ travel to the capital for the event.

The well-scrubbed suburbanites in fresh T-shirts and blue jeans could have been heading for a lazy day at the beach as they boarded their charter bus Sunday, clutching coolers and backpacks.

But the 300 or so gays and lesbians who had flown from Orange County were instead on their way to the tumultuous march for gay rights that attracted hundreds of thousands of people to downtown Washington on Sunday.

They traveled 2,500 miles--from “behind the Orange Curtain,” as they put it--to take part in one of the largest civil rights marches in the nation’s history.

“I think the time is right to show who we are,” said Libby Cowan, a former leader of the Elections Committee of the County of Orange. “We are your neighbors, your co-workers, your siblings, your moms and dads.”

Rebecca Chadwick, a registered nurse and Vietnam-era Navy veteran who raised six children with her partner of 14 years, Gaylene Stoner, put it just as directly. “Discrimination is simply not acceptable,” she said, “and that’s why we’re here in Washington.”

For the Orange County contingent, Sunday’s march was a mixture of drama and comedy, festival and foul-up.

For starters, about 80 members of the group were told belatedly that their accommodations at the Crystal City Marriott, a few minutes’ subway ride from the march staging area, had been canceled. Many wound up instead at another Marriott near Dulles Airport, a $45 cab ride from downtown Washington. Others found much more expensive rooms closer in, or stayed with friends.

Once assembled at the staging area on the Ellipse, just south of the White House, the Orange County marchers and the rest of the California delegation baked under a warm spring sun for more than three hours before receiving the signal to step off.

The delay was caused by members of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a group of radical AIDS activists who staged a “die-in” at the front of the parade just before the march was scheduled to begin.

And then there were the leather people, officially designated in the march program as the SM/Leather/Fetish contingent. Dressed in black leather chaps, vests and collars, sporting pierced ears, noses and nipples, the predominantly male crowd burst into the march line just in front of the more conservatively attired Orange County group.

Their appearance did not go unnoticed.

“God, they must be hot in all that,” one Orange County woman remarked. Another suggested that their presence all but ensured the Orange County delegation some attention from the television cameras that lined the parade route along Pennsylvania Avenue.

Trailing a group of gay employees from Walt Disney studios in Burbank and Walt Disney World in Florida, the Orange County marchers saluted the company’s Anaheim roots. They broke into renditions of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, and adapted Disney’s “It’s a Small World” to become “It’s a Gay World”--after all.

And they recited their own home-grown chant, “Two, four, six, eight. Orange County’s not so straight.”

“Wherever we go, people snap their fingers (in recognition), because some of the biggest homophobes and homo-haters are based” in Orange County, Chadwick said. “Our enemies are very powerful. We need to work harder than the people in San Francisco do.”

Ironically, some who came from Orange County credited their political opponents with the massive turnout at Sunday’s march.

“I think one of the reasons we got so many mainstream gays and lesbians here for the march is what the Republicans said during their (1992 political) convention,” said Rita Edwards of Cypress. “The Republicans don’t know what they did for us.”

Not that Orange County gays plan to ignore their own Republican representatives.

On Friday, Laguna Beach resident Pat Callahan and a dozen other members of the Orange County group met with Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) in his Capitol Hill office. Callahan described the meeting as cordial and informative.

Other sessions are planned with aides to Reps. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), Jay Kim (R-Diamond Bar), who represents Yorba Linda, and Ron Packard (R-Oceanside), whose district includes South Orange County.

Missing from the list are Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who was a strident critic of homoerotic art funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), a longtime opponent of the gay rights movement.

“We want to get to know them, and we want them to get to know us,” Callahan said. “The right-wing fanatics have had too much say about who we are. We want to step up to the plate and say who we are.” Callahan is a board member of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, a major gay and lesbian fund-raising organization.

For Mitch Goldstone and Carl Berman, the march was an opportunity to challenge some entrenched myths about gay relationships--especially the one which holds that few last longer than one night.

“Carl and I have been together for 10 years,” Goldstone said. “Not only do we live together, we work together”--at 30-Photo, Etc., an Irvine photofinishing business the men own. On Saturday, they participated in a group marriage ceremony that was part of the weekend’s activities.

And for Karen S. Hight, who works in the composing room at the Los Angeles Times’ Orange County Edition, the most special part of the day was the recognition that she is not alone. “This is the farthest I have ever traveled in my whole life,” Hight said. “I felt I just had to be here. I have goose bumps.”

But Tom Peterson of Newport Beach, who works for the federal government, said gays’ most important work will begin when the Orange County marchers return home.

“It feels good here,” Peterson said. “It’s easy to hold hands in Dupont Circle,” a predominantly gay neighborhood in Washington. “It’s not as easy in Corona del Mar.”