New York AIDs Walk: 45,000 Walkers Raise $6 Million

More than 45,000 People and $6 Million Dollars Later, the New York AIDS Walk held this past weekend was simply an unbelievable event. Now in its 27th year, this walk remains the largest one-day HIV awareness/fundraising event in the world, and the energy and camaraderie has to be experienced to be understood.

We set out at about 9 am from our hostel in Chelsea to find the subways a little more crowded than usual for a Sunday morning. As we emerged on 5th Avenue, we could see streams of hundreds of people coming from every direction and every cross street heading for Central Park. As we entered, it was no longer hundreds, but thousands - over 45,000. 45,000 people who became instant friends and co-marchers in an effort to help those affected by the viral scourge of the modern world.

The diversity of the walkers was exciting, humbling, tear-producing, and mind-boggling.

Muslim women in head scarves posed for pictures with bare-chested “Bears.” Blacks, Asians, Whites, East Indians and Hispanics of every possible permutation and combination. Young mothers with strollers, dads with baby slings, and women carrying their babies in their bellies. Saint Bernards and Dachsunds. Senior Citizens walking slowly, steadily, with fabulous blue-sequined shoes, and young kids running the six miles who thought that all of us old folks were walking too slow. Fraternity boys by the score, sorority sisters, and corporate teams with company shirts. Families wearing homemade T-shirts commemorating a loved one lost to HIV or AIDs.

My partner and I were joined by our friend Joe and arrived at the Park as a Team named “BearServices.” Marching bare-chested (as Bears are wont to do), donning suspenders, and carrying teddy bears, we stepped off that morning to a special shout-out by Dot-Marie Jones (the actress who plays Coach Shannon Beiste on "Glee.") From atop her 'perch' above the walkers, she pointed us out proclaiming, "the Bears are here!" and then warned us to "....stay out of the woods!" The photographers surrounded us, clicked away madly - - -and that's how the walk started for us.

It never occurred to us before we started that, in this enormous crowd of 45,000 people, we would run into another group of bears from Long Island with whom we had facebook contact as we rested on a rock outcropping in Central Park (a rock that will forever be known to us now as “Bear Rock!”). Or that we would end up dancing in the street, as only silly middle-aged guys can, to the giggles and cheers of other walkers as music blared out from someone’s boom box. Or that we would stop for some refreshments at a Diner on Broadway and have a wonderful lunch with someone of an entirely different race, gender, and age bracket – who marches every year - and who became an instant friend. And after all the craziness, and sore feet, and chafed thighs, and exhaustion, and four hours under a blazing sun, we would be amazed yet again to run into the woman who registered us for the walk the day before – and who had also become an instant friend when we discovered she lived in the town I was born in.

Yeah, we’re sore today. But what an amazing, wonderful, crazy experience it was. I can’t imagine missing it next year….

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