San Diegans who were on board the National Marriage Equality Express that crisscrossed the country for eight days educating people about marriage equality have returned, full of insight and an enhanced sense of purpose for the cause. Activists Anthony White, chair of San Diego’s chapter of Immigration Equality, and Nadine Jernewall, chair of Marriage Equality California’s (MECA) San Diego chapter, took to the highways on Oct. 4 as part of the MECA-sponsored National Marriage Equality Express, a bus carrying 47 people advocating for equal partnership rights at pre-scheduled rallies in 14 U.S. cities, culminating in a rally held in Washington, D.C. on National Coming Out Day.

“I think it’s really easy to demonize us when we stay in the shadows and don’t speak out for ourselves,” Jernewall said. “By coming out and just talking to people, it’s harder to make those kinds of comments to somebody’s face when they look like your cousin or your neighbor.”

After its departure from San Francisco, the caravan stopped in Sacramento, Reno, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus and Pittsburgh before reaching the nation’s capital.

“It really taught me a lot about learning not to expect what other people are going to think about you or how other people are going to relate to you,” White said.

The attention their large group, all wearing matching marriage equality T-shirts, attracted at rest stops throughout the country when they poured out of a bus emblazoned with the words “Marriage Equality Express” frequently caused passerby to offer words of encouragement and acceptance.

“I mean, someone you wouldn’t expect at all to be like that; someone that that subject would never have come up if it was just me in a car with friends that stopped by to get a soda,” White said.

“We were just kind of a protest wherever we went,” Jernewall said.

Three ministers road on board as well, providing educated religious dialogue and oft-necessary counterarguments to biblical justifications against GLBTs and same-sex marriage.

One of the props the group used at rallies was an oversized scroll printed with the 1,138 federal marriage rights currently denied same-sex couples. “People have this conception of why gay people want to get married… and when it comes down to these really practical things, like ‘this is a right that somebody really needs that they can’t have,’ … it’s not just this concept [anymore],” Jernewall said.

The riders’ mission to put human faces on the issue of marriage equality proved to be not only a mind-opening experience for the public they encountered, but also for themselves. “I think that the way the whole issue is kind of portrayed is that people in the middle are against gay people, and they don’t want us to have marriage, and we have all these ideas of what they think,” Jernewall said. “People don’t ask tough questions; they want really basic information and then are pretty supportive. … I think that was the most surprising thing – how many people came out in support versus how many people came out in opposition.”

Even the rallies the group participated in at every stop along the way were surprisingly light on protesters. Attendance at the rallies varied dramatically from city to city, depending on what time and day of the week the rally was scheduled for. In Reno, Nev., for example, there were only a handful of curious onlookers at a midday rally, but several hundred at rallies in St. Louis, Mo., and in Washington, D.C.

“Some people were really shocked if they came across us, like in Laramie [Wyo.] at the university or in Pittsburgh at their university,” White said. “…They just thought that they’d kind of been left off the political map or something.”

The tour’s official theme, “Inspire Justice”, was crafted to represent the riders’ intention of sharing their stories so that rally participants in each town would share theirs, and the experience was frequently emotional for everyone involved.

White recalled one transsexual woman in Indianapolis who spoke at that city’s rally about the nightmare of legal tangles she experienced after her wife died involving the couple’s life-insurance company, which did not want to pay out survivor benefits, saying that the couple’s marriage was no longer valid since the woman’s sexual reassignment surgery.

One of the riders, a female military officer, came out to her superiors by participating in the caravan and now faces persecution under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and loss of her pension fund.

In Laramie, a retired officer who was the chief of police during the time of Matthew Shepard’s murder spoke to the rally participants, and said working on the Shepard case changed him profoundly. “He said, ‘I used to be all of the things that are awful: I used to be a bigot, I used to be a homophobe, I used to tell all the horrible jokes, I used to call people all the horrible names,’” White said. “…He was crying, and saying, ‘I’m the biggest offender.’ He goes and does rallies with Judy Shepard [now].”

Wherever they went, serendipitous things seemed to happen, they said.

Visiting the bar in Laramie where Shepard was abducted proved one of the most pronounced. Unplanned, the group arrived in Laramie on the anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death, and held a mini-vigil in his honor. “It was sunny and beautiful… and as soon as we started the service, it starts raining, like really hard rain,” White recalled. While a longtime GLBT activist from Chicago delivered an impassioned speech against hate crimes, “the sky just let loose with hail like you wouldn’t believe, just insane. Then we got back on the bus and it cleared up,” he said.

White and Jernewall, who spoke at many of the rallies about the impact the inability to obtain marriage rights has on same-sex binational couples, said ideas for future bus tours are already springing up, including touring through the South and touring from the U.S.-Mexico border to the U.S.-Canadian border advocating immigration equality. MECA is also considering making the National Marriage Equality Express an annual event.

A six-hour documentary of the National Marriage Equality Express is slated for release in November.