These Moms Never Stopped Fighting For Their Sons

Shortly after her youngest son died of AIDS in 1994, Patsy Clarke received a phone call at her Raleigh home from a woman she’d never met. The woman, Eloise Vaughn, also of Raleigh, introduced herself with what Clarke remembered as a warm, Southern voice. 

“I understand you’ve lost a son to AIDS,” Vaughn said. “So have I.” 

That was the beginning of a remarkable partnership. Their message of acceptance and respect for gays and lesbians took them to the national stage in an era when discrimination and anti-gay rhetoric was common. Their friendship lasted until December, when Clarke died at 95. Vaughn died a month later at 92.

The women were bound by the deaths of their sons–and also by their distaste for U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms and his frequent, bitter denunciations of gays and lesbians, including criticism of Clarke’s son. They founded Mothers Against Jesse In Congress (MAJIC) in 1995 and campaigned against Helms in 1996, when he was elected to his fifth and final term. He died in 2008.

Each woman was a force of nature, and when they worked together, family and friends said they were fearless. Vaughn, who’d long been active in politics, knew how to organize and get things done. Clarke, who’d worked in theater for decades, understood the power of a dramatic story and never saw a microphone she didn’t like. 

They were a formidable and compelling team, two grieving mothers in their 60s with a simple message advocating for decency and respect. They stood up publicly for their sons and other gay sons, many of whom had been ostracized or abandoned by their families. 

The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and People magazine told their story. Clarke and Vaughn produced a TV ad, in which they both appeared, scolding Helms for appealing “to the worst in all of us.” They spoke at an event affiliated with the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. When they co-wrote a book, C-SPAN aired a segment about them.

“They were two hurricanes who joined forces at just the right time for the right cause,” Speedy Rice, Clarke’s son-in-law, said after a celebratory service in her honor Saturday. 

Always, they were driven by the memory of their sons, both named Mark. 

The Two Marks

Vaughn and her lawyer husband, Earl, started their family of four children in Eden, north of Greensboro, before moving to Raleigh in the early 1970s. Their oldest son, Mark, graduated from Broughton High School. 

Mark had always been different. He wasn’t interested in sports or hunting, like his father and two brothers; Mark liked singing and theater. His frustrated father, who had grown up on a farm as the youngest of 11 children, tried to “straighten him out” by sending him to military school in Virginia, Mark’s brother John told me. (John Vaughn and I attended the same church and have been friends for 20 years.) 

That didn’t work, nor did anything else his father tried. While he didn’t share his father’s interests, Mark was personable and industrious. He had loyal friends, and his teachers liked him.  

Mark always had part-time jobs and a nice car, and he was generous with his money. He worked two summers at an inn in Blowing Rock where he and the other student employees sang and danced after dinner every night. 

He graduated from North Carolina State University with a degree in communications and took a job at a television station in Atlanta, where he became a producer. 

In the late 1980s, he returned to Raleigh and told his mother he was gay–and that he likely had AIDS, for which there was no effective treatment then. His AIDS was confirmed the next day. It was a death sentence.  

Her husband had just died of cancer, and Eloise Vaughn was thrown from one crisis into another, as she recounted in the book she co-wrote with Clarke. For the next 18 months, she took care of her son in his old upstairs bedroom. 

The ministers at her Methodist church visited infrequently, but a Catholic priest, Jeffrey Ingham, dropped by often, sometimes daily, even though none of the Vaughns were Catholic. She was astounded by Father Ingham’s devotion and in awe of his love and compassion.

To die from AIDS was to die a terrible death. Patients often had what the journalist Randy Shilts described as a “bizarre constellation of symptoms” that were “excruciatingly awful”–lesions, chronic diarrhea, shortness of breath, infections, and other pneumonia-like symptoms. Their immune systems were shot. Mark Vaughn’s weight dropped from 210 pounds to less than 100 when he died at home in 1990. He was 34. 

A few years later, Patsy Clarke would join the same dreaded club as Eloise Vaughn. 

The Clarke family always thought their Mark, the youngest of four, was different, similar to how the Vaughn family thought about their Mark. Growing up in Asheville, Mark Clarke was an exuberant child who loved an audience and lived for the moment. He enjoyed the theater and once appeared in a play at the Asheville Community Theater with his mother.  

“He was all personality,” said his brother Bruce, who was five years older. “He had an ability to entertain and create laughter.”  

Bruce remembered Mark, who would grow to be 6-foot-7, running around the house with a cape over his shoulders. 

“Mom, you’ve got to do something about Mark!” he said.

She didn’t know what to do. Mark was charismatic, but he could be irresponsible and lazy. He laughed about it, and somehow he made her laugh about it, too.  

He graduated from T.C. Roberson High in Asheville and later received a biology degree from the College of Charleston. He worked in a variety of jobs–as a lifeguard, in a T-shirt shop, in theater–before attending law school in California. It was there he developed chronic diarrhea, bleeding gums, and oral thrush. He was diagnosed with AIDS. 

He dropped out of law school, moved back to Florida​​ to be with his partner, and eventually revealed his diagnosis and sexual orientation to his mother. His father had died in a plane crash a few years earlier. His mom was at her son’s side in West Palm Beach when he died in March 1994, seven years to the day of her husband’s death. Mark Clarke was 31.

‘The Hard Bench of Reality’

When Clarke learned simultaneously of her son’s sexual orientation and AIDS diagnosis (what she and Vaughn later called “the double whammy”), she confessed she was afraid of what people would think. She’d done her share of sitting quietly when people joked about “homos.” She knew AIDS typically was sexually transmitted by gay men.  

“I certainly knew that ‘nice people’ didn’t get into such fixes. Looked like a choice to me,” she wrote in Keep Singing: Two Mothers, Two Sons, and Their Fight Against Jesse Helms, co-written with Vaughn. “How easily I sat in the seat of judgment then. Now I was being offered a space on the hard bench of reality.” 

She decided she valued her son more than she valued what people thought. She told her friends, first confidentially and then openly. She moved to Raleigh, and shortly after her son’s death, she met Vaughn. They bonded quickly. Clarke wrote that they always had “a waterfall of things to say.”  

Vaughn was a loyal Democrat. Her husband had served in the state legislature as speaker of the House and later as a justice on the state Supreme Court. 

Clarke was a conservative Republican. Her husband had been a prominent businessman and a friend of Helms. When Harry Clarke died, Helms called Patsy, praised him in the Congressional Record, and sent her the American flag flown over the Capitol in her husband’s honor. 

In the 1990s, Helms was the most forceful critic of gays in Congress. He criticized them in strong and personal terms, saying they were “disgusting people” and “perverted human beings.”   

Vaughn told Clarke that Helms was no friend of gay people, sometimes handing her newspaper clippings. Clarke’s daughter Judy, a nationally prominent criminal defense lawyer, urged her to write to Helms in hopes she could change his rhetoric. Clarke hesitated.  

“Who do I think I am?” she asked as she doubted herself. But then she told herself: “I am Mark’s mother. And I will stand up for him.”

She reminded Helms that she was the widow of his friend Harry Clarke. She informed him that their son was gay and died of AIDS. She asked Helms not to pass judgment on AIDS victims as “deserving what they get” and to “share [Mark’s] memory with me in compassion.”

Helms responded by acknowledging Clarke’s “poignant letter” and explaining his views on AIDS research funding (that it shouldn’t be more than for other illnesses). He continued: “As for Mark, I wish he had not played Russian roulette in his sexual activity. … I have sympathy for him–and for you. But there is no escaping the reality of what happened.” (Their exchange was included in the book Letters of the Century: America 1900-1999.)

First Clarke cried. Then she got angry. Then she and Vaughn decided to fight back. 

“There are things in life you can’t turn from,” Nicole Brodeur, a former columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer, told me. “It [Helms’ letter] ignited Patsy. It ignited Eloise. It fired them up, in the best way. They couldn’t let it go.”

Brodeur met Vaughn and Clarke when she wrote about them in the mid-1990s. Later, she helped them write their book and became a friend. 

“They were so lovely,” Brodeur said. “But inside of them were these steel backbones–steel magnolias, indeed. What a privilege it was to know them.”

When I interviewed Vaughn and Clarke together in 2023 for an article about Helms’ gay granddaughter, they glowed in each other’s presence. They had not seen each other in  months. At one point, remembering their battles in the 1990s, they held hands. 

“It all comes back, doesn’t it, Eloise? I feel shaky inside,” Clarke said. “What we were fighting for was human rights, not just beating Jesse.”

Helms’ granddaughter, Jennifer Knox, spoke to me openly about her journey and her close relationship with him. She never told Helms she was gay. I asked her what she would say to Clarke and Vaughn about her grandfather’s comments. 

“I would tell them I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to do with my grandfather’s views and the way he portrayed them, but I’m still sorry.”

About a month before Clarke died, her son Bruce got his mother and Vaughn together for a final conversation by phone. It was warm and sometimes comical–the two 90-something women had trouble hearing each other. They said they looked forward to seeing each other on the other side.

Patsy Clarke spoke often of the afterlife and believed in reincarnation. She was creative and free-spirited. Her business card said: 

Patsy Clarke

Human Being 

She had planned several memorial services for herself over the years, including one with a marching band playing the show tune “Seventy-Six Trombones” from The Music Man. For practical reasons, her family was compelled to scale back her request. There was no marching band at the country club ballroom in Raleigh on Saturday, although there was a mimosa toast, for she loved Champagne, and there was a lot of laughter. 

Absent, but present in spirit, were the two long-gone sons who never met each other but who brought their mothers together. In their book, Clarke and Vaughn included photos of their two Marks as young men–forever youthful, handsome, smiling, and full of promise, the way they wanted to remember them. They were proud moms. They never stopped loving their sons.