Each year the “Race for the Cure” creates rivers of bobbing pink T-shirts and hats in cities throughout the country, as hundreds of thousands of breast cancer survivors and their supporters run or walk 5 kilometers to fight the disease.

Seymour Kramer just wishes there were a few flashes of blue in those groups.

Contrary to popular belief, men can get breast cancer too, and pink just doesn’t say “manly,” he feels.

“Men are totally ignorant. They are ignorant of the fact that they can get breast cancer because they like to feel they’re above it, or macho or something,” Mr. Kramer said. “You could combine a pink and blue ribbon to signify that it affects both men and women.”

A breast cancer survivor of 14 years, Mr. Kramer has lobbied the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration, Congress, the press, and anyone else who will listen in his quest for gender equity in breast cancer publicity.

The Komen Foundation has begun to roll out gray T-shirts for the race, which raised $97 million last year to fight breast cancer, but it has been hesitant to adopt blue because the color is associated with prostate cancer, said a spokeswoman for the foundation, Rebecca Gibson.

Mr. Kramer, 81, who lives in West Brunswick, N.J., and is also a four-year survivor of prostate cancer, said he “never knew men could get breast cancer” until he woke up one morning and discovered blood on his nipple. “There’s just not enough information out there,” he said.

Breast cancer in men accounts for 1% of all breast cancer cases, according to the American Cancer Society. The chief of breast cancer surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Dr. Patrick Borgen, says that based on statistics from the National Cancer Database, nearly 2,000 men will likely be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, up from 1,600 last year, when about 800 men died of the disease. He attributes much of the rise to the natural aging of the population – the average man gets breast cancer between age 60 and 65.

My father, Richard Wyatt, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987 at age 39, and it didn’t take long for my initial giggle at the word “breast” to trail off when I realized his diagnosis was serious. I was in seventh grade, and most of my friends thought my dad’s cancer was just another story I concocted to test the limits of their gullibility. Breast cancer? In a man? It wasn’t until the priest in my church offered up prayers for my father that my friends realized their mistake.

I never doubted that my father, a doctor, would recover. And after a mastectomy to remove his left breast and nipple – along with some of the lymph nodes in his armpit – he was fine. At the time, chemotherapy and radiation were not part of the treatment protocol for Stage 1 breast cancer, although that changed shortly after his treatment.

Today, 18 years later, my father remains cancer-free. While he has a long scar running across his chest, he doesn’t give it a second thought as he goes waterskiing or windsurfing on the lake behind my parents’ Minnesota home, and neither do we.

When men get breast cancer, it is in the milk ducts directly behind their nipples, Dr. Borgen said. Women can develop the disease in their milk ducts – which are more numerous in females – and in their milk glands, which produce milk.

Because men are less likely to go to a doctor when they develop a lump or nipple discharge and general practitioners are less likely to immediately diagnose the problem in men, the cancer generally goes untreated longer in men than in women.

A study of male breast cancer cases at Sloan-Kettering in the 1970s and ’80s found there was an average gap of 18 months between the first symptoms and treatment, according to Dr. Borgen. Now, due to better education and resources for breast cancer patients, the delay has shrunk to about six months, he said. And if it is treated early, male breast cancer is no more difficult to treat than female breast cancer, he added.

Larry Cowell wasted no time in getting the lump in his left breast checked out. Mr. Cowell, 60, of Norristown, Pa., was diagnosed with breast cancer last April. He had a lumpectomy, has completed his chemotherapy and radiation, and says he is starting to get his energy back, although he is still taking tamoxifen, or hormone therapy.

Mr. Cowell, who is unmarried, turned to an online breast cancer chat room to communicate with other patients after he discovered there were no support groups in Pennsylvania for men with breast cancer – only those for men with prostate cancer.

“The women initially were suspicious,” Mr. Cowell said of the chat room. “But then when they realized I was the real deal, I was warmly accepted.”

He says pink’s dominance in the breast cancer field doesn’t bother him, but he does wish there were more education aimed at men. “There is a lot of publicity about women’s breast cancer,” Mr. Cowell said. “Once in a while they’ll add: ‘And men can get it too.'”