Hi, my name is Mina Close and I was born and raised here in Norwich, New York. I moved out of here in about 1973 and I moved to Michigan. I lived different places in Michigan. I married a person and we lived together for quite a while, and we lived in Romeo, Michigan for many years. Now, at that point, my ex-husband had a brother named Steven, whose wife, Pam, had a brother named Chuck, who unfortunately had Aids. After he died, his panel was displayed at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was part of history in the making. Unfortunately, this was part of history. The Aids quilt is the largest community project in the history of the United States. 2006 people were on that quilt. The quilt fully displayed has 48,000 panels on it. 48 of these little guys, 93,000 names were the victims on each panel. Each panel is 12 by 12. Overwhelming that we too say our last goodbyes to someone who’s cared about not knowing there was a way out. People were afraid. They were afraid of human beings. Each of us are human beings. We had smallpox. We had polio. We had all kinds of things. And nobody was afraid of those people. But if you said you were gay, they ran. What about Covid? Look at us now. People go around saying, oh, I had Covid, I had Covid twice and nobody cares. They have medicine to help them. Look at the danger. And look what happened. We could have saved so many lives. Think of it. Millions of lives could have been saved if people had stepped forward. The medical industry– they had the means. And the reason why, I guess I’m so passionate about it, is because 32 million people to this day have died from Aids. 32 million! That’s a lot of people. And the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit displayed this. And it was a huge, it’s a huge, huge arena. And they had it laid out. So we went down to see Chuck’s panel. He had two of them there. You walk in as if you were walking into a church. It was quiet. It was solemn. Nobody was there out of curiosity. They were there to see their loved ones, say goodbye. The only chance they had some of them, some of them couldn’t get to their funeral. Some of them couldn’t say goodbye for the last time. I knew Chuck, he went by Chase a lot of times. But he was fun, he was vibrant, he was a human. We’re all human. Cut us open, we all bleed. I’m heterosexual, but I believe that everyone has a right to be who they want to be. And seeing the Aids quilt is like something I have never seen before in my life. It was like pieces of people on a floor and there were tears, there was laughter, there was talk. You met people from all walks of life. I mean, I met a surgeon, I met a lawyer, I met ordinary people. One lady was so overtaken that her son had died from Aids, and she didn’t even know it because her son was so afraid of coming out. He thought his mom would disown him. So what we did was we embraced her. We hugged her, we talked to her, and she was so sad because he was afraid to talk to his own mother that he was gay. And look how far we’ve come. That was in 1991. The panels were beautiful, decorated from pieces of clothing they had. Each had been hand sewed on and people wrote. I wrote on a couple of panels of Chuck’s — how much we loved him, how much we missed him. We drew faces, funny faces or funny sayings, you know, like he lost his what he called his Gucci bag. And he lived in DC and we played a joke on him and called him up, saying we were the police and we found his Gucci bag and he was so excited. And we were laughing so hard because it was a joke. And he goes, I don’t believe you guys. And it was fun because he was our friend. It was her brother. And people called them names just like they did the African American people, just like they did the indigenous peoples. It makes me sad, but I’m glad we are progressing in a time now where we can actually start acting like human beings.
