For some it’s a nice date out. For others it’s a memorial walk, a celebration, a way to get exercise, or a way to make a difference, if only for a day.

It’s AIDS Walk San Diego – and if there’s one thing that’s clear about this event, which takes place this Sunday, Sept. 26, for its 15th year, it’s that the walk is many different things to many different people.

For Adela and Charles Keefer, Volunteer Award winners for AIDS Walk 2003, the walk is a big thank-you to Christie’s Place in honor of their son, who visited the site every Thursday before succumbing to colon cancer a few years ago.

For Karen Fort, who’s been walking since the program’s beginning in 1989, it’s a way to affect change. Fort’s cousin and good friend were both diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the early days. She puts her commitment bluntly: “I’m not going away until HIV goes away.”

For Dr. Flora Danque, who served on AIDS Walk’s interim board of directors in 2002 and now creates and supports the medical team for the event, AIDS Walk is about raising awareness in the general public. Danque has been personally and professionally affected by HIV/AIDS: Her aunt contracted HIV through a blood transfusion in 1985, and as a medical intern in Minnesota, Danque remembers staying post-call to sit and hold the hand of a dying AIDS patient who had been disowned by his family. “I don’t know how anyone can not be affected by this horrible disease,” says Danque.

Carole Norman, a retired nurse and an Outstanding Service Award winner for AIDS Walk 2003, still doesn’t know exactly why she walks – but walk she does, and has been since 1989.

“Sometimes you just wake up and think, ‘This is something I should be doing.’ So you just do it,” says Norman, “… Maybe you just think, ‘This is a way that I can be helpful’ – and eventually you just meet people and you have a good time and you start doing things and you know you’re doing something right.”

This Sunday, 10,000-12,000 people will join Norman in doing something right for the more than 5,000 people living with AIDS in San Diego County. AIDS Walk 2004 is expected to raise upwards of $400,000, benefiting 32 local HIV/AIDS service providers on both sides of the border. The event includes a festival complete with a “Fun Zone” and rock wall, live DJs, music by boogie-woogie blues pianist Sue Palmer and the San Diego Men’s Chorus, politicians’ remarks – and even cheerleaders. All of this energy reflects a remarkable degree of growth and change not only in AIDS Walk as an event – but also an evolution in the disease itself and the public’s perception of it.

In other words, AIDS Walk – like AIDS itself – hasn’t always been like this.

“In those days it was so much smaller,” remembers Ben Dillingham of the early years when mostly GLBT people put on something called San Diego Walks for Life in the late 1980s. A long-time supporter of the community, Dillingham is also an AIDS Walk sponsor, the current chair of the AIDS Foundation and the former chair of the interim board for AIDS Walk in 2002.

“Now it’s kind of massive,” says Dillingham. “… There’s barricades put up, and there’s a huge presence felt. … In those days it was a couple of hundred people I guess, and we hoped a car would honk at us.”

Around the year 1986, a woman named Susan Chester founded San Diego Walks for Life, in order to create funds for the first AIDS provider in San Diego, the AIDS Project. Chester’s organization did not have nonprofit status, and was able to raise a very limited amount of funds – but it was a start, or a first step, if you will. Subsequent executive directors who ran San Diego Walks for Life after Chester included community activists Albert Bell and Gary Reese, both of whom eventually succumbed to AIDS. The walk started at the County Administration building on Pacific Highway and paraded along Harbor Drive to Harbor Island and back.

It’s easy to think of those early days, by comparison to the cheerleaders, performers, politicians and families that come out for the event today, as somber.

Not exactly, says Dillingham. “I think … we tried even then to make it a celebration – we were losing people that were near and dear to us, but we tried even so to make it something that went with their personalities and to bring awareness …”

Nicole Murray-Ramirez, another well-known community leader and founder of the Imperial Court de San Diego among other community organizations (as well as being a columnist for this paper) was also there for San Diego Walks for Life, but remembers the event more somberly. A long-time political activist, Murray-Ramirez felt keenly the lack of interest from civic leaders. In stark contrast to the large number of civic leaders that participate in the event today, Murray-Ramirez remembers, “I would talk to some politicians and they wouldn’t [even] want to write letters in support of the program. … We wouldn’t have any politicians show up. … It was those early, dark times, where many were out there struggling to put on these events.”

Murray-Ramirez is particularly concerned that organizers and participants today acknowledge the early trailblazers of AIDS Walk and San Diego Walks for Life.

“It’s upsetting for me, because when you open up the [AIDS Walk 2004] program this year and other years it’s as if this history never happened. … We can’t rewrite history and we can’t forget history. … We cannot erase these [early founders] of AIDS Walk, who succumbed to this disease and who were leaders in our community.”

“The history has gotten muddled,” says Scott Fulkerson, a long-time community leader and former Center executive director who currently serves as executive director of the Citizens’ Review Board on Police Practices. Fulkerson also remembers San Diego Walks for Life, but says the organization didn’t become an effective fundraiser until 1989, when three early local organizations – The Center, whose executive director at the time was Fulkerson, the AIDS Project and the San Diego County AIDS Assistance Fund decided to take the event in hand. However, says Fulkerson, the executive directors of the AIDS Project and the AIDS Assistance Fund were unable to convince their boards to take on the event, and so it became a program of The Center in 1989.

Dr. Garrett Detley chaired the board, remembers Fulkerson, and a man named Tim Williams became AIDS Walk’s first executive director. Williams, a gay man who eventually died of AIDS, was reportedly a major force behind the success of AIDS Walk.

“It’s such a shame the community has forgotten about him,” says former AIDS Walk executive director Barbara Blake, of Williams. Blake was also a personal friend of Williams, who, once AIDS Walk had been drawn under The Center’s umbrella, proceeded to set up shop in his living room and drafted his closest friends – among them Blake – to help.

“He basically ran it out of his house,” says Blake. “… We would be in his living room licking stamps until 3:00 in the morning, and it was great. This was a rather close-knit group of friends. Many of us had already lost people to AIDS. … Unfortunately Tim developed AIDS during that first year and became very sick the next year. And so he could not continue to do everything. And he asked me – and I was just trained as a biologist – but he asked me if I would take it over. And so we moved AIDS Walk to the spare room in my house.”

Blake, currently the assistant dean of biological studies at the University of California, San Diego, became the second executive director of AIDS Walk and by all accounts was also instrumental in the walk’s early success. Why change direction from biological research to running a grassroots organization to benefit a disease people knew little about? “I cared very much about what was happening in the community,” says Blake, “and also because Tim now, who was a friend, was struggling with AIDS.”

Blake, whom Fulkerson describes as a woman of “immense dedication and integrity,” served as executive director from 1990 to 1998. A first step in her tenure, she remembers, was moving the organization headquarters from her spare room, to “a janitor’s closet under the stairs” at The Center.

But what the early organizers lacked in facilities was well made up for in fervor. Blake recruited not only her own nieces and nephews to get involved and educated through AIDS Walk, but also reached out to as many community groups, ages and ethnicities as possible to build bridges to the larger community.

“Everyone felt very strongly that it was [considered] a gay disease and we wanted to fight that as much as possible,” says Blake. With volunteer nurse Carole Norman, AIDS Walk organizers developed the People of Color Coalition, going out to make partnerships between AIDS Walk and the African-American and Latino communities. The diversity of the walk is one of the best things about the experience of walking, according to Norman, who has now raised a family who participate in the walk. (Her son, Marc Norman, organizes the safety team.) When asked how the walk has changed since San Diego Walks for Life, Norman is effusive: “Oh, it’s more inclusive! More diverse! It’s fantastic,” she says. “When we first started it was basically gay men, maybe a few lesbians, maybe a few straight people, who were friends or families of someone [affected]. We didn’t see families. We’ve started getting more people of color involved. Now as I look out … corporations are involved; community clubs are involved. It’s very, very diverse.”

Blake is particularly proud of the organization’s early efforts at bringing in kids to participate. “By the time I left,” says Blake, “the finish line was packed with about 15 Girl Scout and Brownie troops. One of my favorite pictures … is of some Girl Scouts looking at the quilt. … It was about camaraderie and openness and understanding – and that’s how these kids were getting educated.”

Eventually, AIDS Walk in the early 1990s became a separate organization with its own board of directors and bylaws. Under Blake, this worked. But, according to Fulkerson and Dillingham, both of whom have followed the evolution of AIDS Walk since its early days, after Blake left, the organization failed to meet the growing challenges that a fundraising event of this kind is faced with.

“What we found in San Diego was that you couldn’t support a separate organization, that the cost of the event ate up all of the proceeds and you had nothing to give out,” says Dillingham.

Around the year 2001, the effectiveness of AIDS Walk San Diego had declined so dramatically that an interim board of directors was formed to decide what to do. Dillingham chaired the interim board, and Fulkerson served on it.

“They were on their last legs,” says Fulkerson, “with a huge amount of debt. Every dime they’d raised had been spent.”

In 2002, AIDS Walk became a program of The Center, and it seems the community breathed a sigh of relief. Fulkerson, for one, is glad to see the event come full circle.

“I think The Center took it on because they are the community center,” he says. “They do have a responsibility to the community, and they were just well aware of the needs of the AIDS community. And they once again stepped up – as they did back in my day – to answer the needs of the community. It was a big risk. It’s a risk today, and it was a risk back then … But I think it’s part of The Center’s mission.”

No one could agree more than Center Executive Director Delores Jacobs.

“HIV/AIDS has been and continues to be one of the events that has defined the character of our community,” said Jacobs in a written statement to the Gay & Lesbian Times. “In San Diego, more people have died from HIV/AIDS than the number of San Diegans who died in World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the first Gulf War combined. That is fear, grief and loss on a scale most communities have never known.

“AIDS Walk symbolizes for me the incredible spirit and great heart of our community. It is a response of hope, a collective ‘we can help make a difference’ attitude, and a response of great compassion. It is our community fighting back against the overwhelming grief and the disease that has threatened so many among us for so long.”

Today, AIDS walks all over the country confront the same challenges faced by AIDS organizations and people with AIDS – while much of the ignorance about the disease is gone, apathy has set in. Many people, including young gay men and those in some of the populations at most risk for contracting HIV, have a general impression that more people are living with AIDS because of the medications that have become available in the past decade. At the same time, other nonprofit organizations have become savvier about marketing fundraising efforts, and AIDS walks now face an increasing amount of competition from other fundraising nonprofits sponsoring walks and runs.

“In San Diego,” says The Center’s AIDS Walk Project Manager Megan Blanek, “there are so many great causes it seems there’s a walk every other week. … My challenge is to convey the urgency of what we’re doing, but still make it family entertainment. We want you to come out and bring your friends and have a good time, but we want you to be aware of why you’re doing it.”

While The Center has cut both event and operating expenses by 25 percent, with 50 percent of funds raised now going directly to AIDS service providers in the region, the event still faces enormous hurdles of competition and public apathy amidst rising HIV infection rates and funding crises. AIDS walks in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Colorado and Washington, D.C. have in recent years reported declining numbers in both participation and funding. AIDS Walk San Diego’s numbers are down slightly from those reported by AIDS Walk San Diego five years ago.

But amidst increased competition and declining interest, the walk goes on.

“The Center has done a fabulous job at keeping it going simply because they’ve been able to cut the overhead costs so significantly, which meant that the money for the agencies has been sustained,” says Dillingham. “… I don’t know how long-term that formula will be successful, because the competition [of other nonprofits’ walks] keeps increasing. … There is so much noise out there, and I don’t mean that disrespectfully. All of the organizations out there … have gotten sophisticated about getting the dollars.”

“Walks themselves are not as successful as they once were,” says Fulkerson. “You don’t find many weekends where some organization is not having a walk for this or a walk for that. … AIDS walks all over the country are making less and less …”

“When we first began it,” says Fulkerson, “there was a real sense of urgency and sense of mission. We don’t see AIDS the same way as we did … and I think the younger generation sees AIDS as really a treatable disease … and I think one of the challenges of the walk is to get that sense of urgency with people.”

“I think the challenge is that it has become somewhat of an industry,” says Blake, “and sometimes when I look at AIDS organizations around the country – the heart and soul isn’t as visible anymore. … I think it’s still important to keep in touch with all of the various communities, especially young kids.”

So, if the sense of urgency is waning for the walks, are they really necessary anymore?

The answer, for Dillingham, Fulkerson, Blake and anyone who knows anything about AIDS today, is a resounding yes.

According to the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency’s epidemiology report on HIV/AIDS for 2004, 12,034 people have been diagnosed with AIDS in San Diego County since 1984, with county testing sites reporting more than 4,000 HIV-positive diagnoses in the county in the last two years. Since 2001 and 2002, HIV infection rates have again been on the rise, and infection rates remain disproportionately high for African-American and Latino populations, according to data obtained from county testing sites. Meanwhile, AIDS funding is being cut nationwide, leaving local service providers to turn to donations and fundraisers like AIDS Walk to supply the funds that allow these agencies to provide meals, transportation, medications and other services to people living with AIDS. Many HIV/AIDS activists believe that our current presidential administration’s persistence in promoting abstinence-only sex education makes funds for education and awareness campaigns as important as they were a decade ago.

“One of the things I’m really concerned about,” says Blake, “is that I hear about a lot of young HIV-positive guys, and I also know some … and it breaks my heart: They think you can live with this now. … Yes, you can survive now with HIV for a long period of time. But what is that like? … I think we need to do a better job of educating. … [AIDS Walk] still has a role. I always felt it was sort of the soul of the community, and on this one day we put everything aside – the differences between the gay community, the straight community, the African-American community and the Latino community – and we’ve lost a little bit of that spirit.”

So how do we get that spirit back?

To begin with, walk – says Ben Dillingham and other community organizers. Blanek offers that she can’t help but notice the numbers of people who turn out for Padres games in San Diego – and wonder about what’s possible if enough individuals decided to come out to take a few steps for a good cause.

It’s OK to dream, isn’t it?

“That’s my goal,” says Blanek, “to draw as many people as a Padres game on a Saturday night. And it seems certainly doable – there are enough events in this town that get that many people.”

Perhaps it’s possible – even with all the challenges and competition before them; there are AIDS walks in other cities, like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City, that are still drawing numbers of people that top the million mark.

But it’s up to each individual to take the first step.

“I say it over and over again,” says Blanek, “but this is a place where one person can make a difference and I want everyone to believe that.”