Eloise Vaughn Worked her MAJIC

​​By Randy B. Young

Eloise Maddry Vaughn sits in a high-backed chair at her assisted living residence in Raleigh, North Carolina. The former teacher, wife, author, and LGBTQ+ ally can gaze through her window at neighborhoods named for southern flora or old churches.

At 92-years old, she is confident, compassionate, and sharp as a knife.

About her private apartment are hundreds of family photos, some documenting her late husband Earl’s rise in Democratic politics before his death in April 1986. There are photos of her six grandchildren and of her four children: Rose Williams (60), Stuart Vaughn (64), John Vaughn (66), and Mark, who she nursed through AIDS before his death in 1990 at age 34.

Here are uncountable reflections of battles won and lost over the past sixty years, including a campaign in the 1990’s to depose the late Republican Senator Jesse Helms, infamous for racial and homophobic vitriol.

Some pictures chronicle her co-founding of the political action committee “MAJIC” (Mothers Against Jesse in Congress) with Patsy Clarke, 95, who also who lost her own son Mark to AIDS in 1994. The pair published Keep Singing: Two Mothers, Two Sons, and Their Fight Against Jesse Helms (Grassroots Printing, 2001).

“The book was a gift,” celebrated novelist Allan Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All) wrote in the foreword, “from two lionesses in good linen suits.”

A Real “Steel Magnolia”

A Democrat from a family of Democrats, Vaughn was instrumental in her husband’s successful bid for the NC House of Representatives, where he was eventually named Speaker and delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was a tumultuous year in politics, which took the Vaughns all the way to the White House, where the couple met President Lyndon Johnson and his wife Ladybird.

Tragically, as Earl had just assumed a role heading the NC Supreme Court Board of Appeals, he was diagnosed with cancer, succumbing in 1986.

The next year brought the news that Vaughn’s son Mark was battling AIDS, said Vaughn’s daughter Rose Williams, Executive Director of the NC League of Municipalities. “That was when we first understood that Mark was gay,” she said. “He must have been so frustrated with us. I mean, ‘How dumb were we?’”

Eloise knew it was time to take off the silk gloves and assume the role of caregiver.

“It was like something from Dante’s circles [of hell],” Williams explained. “There was no AZT then, and there was a lot of suffering. My mother cared for Mark in an upstairs bedroom. The doctors told her, ‘You’re the reason he’s lasting this long and doing as well as he is.’” Nevertheless, Mark Vaughn died in Spring 1990, the Thursday after Mother’s Day.

“Eloise regularly ventured outside of her own comfort zone to provide comfort to others,” said Tony Burden, an artist and gay activist who was friends and classmates with Vaughn’s son Mark (Burden designed Mark’s memorial panel for the AIDS Quilt).

“She would go and buy marijuana,” he said. “A physician said that it might ease nausea and allow Mark to eat, so here’s this widow of a State Supreme Court Judge doing a drug deal.”

Burden and his husband Barry Mangum even took Eloise to a gay bar in Charlotte for a fundraiser. “She credits us for introducing her to the gay bar scene,” Burden said with a laugh.

“There were also so many other young men dying that were kicked out by their families,” Burden said. “Eloise was a surrogate mother to so many young men, driving them to appointments or even helping to make final arrangements.”

Vaughn had no sympathy for the unsympathetic. Burden recounted the story of a particular young man who passed away after being rejected by his own family:

“Eloise had helped to make arrangements to have him cremated,” he said. “When the family later realized they wanted his ashes, she sent them some potting soil in a box, because she said that was all they deserved.”

Hell Hath No Fury…

A story holds that NC Senator Jesse Helms once whistled “Dixie” at a young, Black, female legislator in a US Capital building elevator.

When he campaigned against Roberta Achtenberg (the first gay woman nominated for high federal office), Helms said, “She’s not your garden-variety lesbian…She’s a militant-activist-mean lesbian.”

Clearly, Helms was a “garden-variety” homophobe.

Vaughn was also shocked at how her church—and many more—saw gays as willing pariahs and saw AIDS as modern-day leprosy.

“Going into a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going into a garage makes you a car,” said retired Baptist minister Mitch Simpson, who appeared with Vaughn and Clarke in the movie Dear Jesse by gay filmmaker and friend Tim Kirkman (NC Film Foundation and Cowboy Pictures, 1998).

“Tim had told me about his project,” Simpson added, “and I was just delighted to help eviscerate Jesse Helms.”

Then the Vaughn’s family funeral home refused to come and pick up Mark’s body.

“I will never get over that,” Vaughn said. “I called a different funeral home in Chapel Hill, and they burned up the road to my house in Raleigh, which felt like everything.”

Vaughn’s friend Clarke, a longtime Republican, wrote a letter to Helms after the 1994 death of her own son Mark, urging AIDS research funding and an end to anti-gay rhetoric, but the Senator’s response was right in character. The reply, “I wish Mark had not played Russian roulette in his sexual activity,” floored Clarke, forcing her to rethink her Republican allegiances. Characteristically callous, Helms’ response was a gut-punch, but it galvanized the resolve of many unlikely heroes, including both Clarke and Vaughn.

Making MAJIC

Self-examination would lead these mothers and others to form MAJIC to strike back at Helms where it hurt—the polls. They’d likely be tilting at windmills, but, as Martin Luther King, Jr., (who Helms branded a “Marxist”) said “the time was always right to do what was right.”

Republicans would be a hard sell, but Vaughn found that even fellow Democrats were dismissive.

“There was still so much prejudice against gays then,” Vaughn said, “and these politicians were protecting their careers.”

Around a dozen grieving mothers—including many more “recovered Republicans”—soon coalesced around Clarke and Vaughn and their message.

“When Mark died, I started to campaign as I had for my husband Earl years before,” Vaughn wrote, “but instead of a seat in the government, it was a campaign for compassion and understanding.”

“Around the creation of MAJIC, we met and fell in love with Eloise and Patsy,” said retired NC business owner and gay activist Art Sperry, 80, “and we worked on fundraisers together, particularly for the Alliance of AIDS Services Carolina.”

“Eloise was a warrior very early on,” Sperry’s husband Paul Otto said. “The important thing was the way she confronted the straight community head-on.”

Vaughn and Clarke were invited to share a stage with Senator Ted Kennedy at an event associated with the 1996 Democratic National Convention (again in Chicago). This and a feature in People Magazine led to interviews in The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and more media requests and donations began flowing in.

In October 1996, the ladies visited the Mall in Washington, D.C. to see display of the AIDS Quilt, a traveling 54-ton memoriam honoring those whom churches and funeral homes would not. Both Marks’ lives were celebrated, along with 40,000 others, with beautifully crafted panels. The quilt is now in San Francisco and accessible virtually.

A “Moral” Victory

As winners were projected on election day in November, the ladies of MAJIC knew it was over. Helms had won again, earning 52.6 percent of the vote (to Charlotte Mayor and Democrat Harvey Gantt’s 45.9 percent).

Coaches diminish the term “moral victory” as just another cheap euphemism for a loss. But, though MAJIC’s triumph would not be at the polls, if ever there had been a victory that was “moral,” here it was.

“We never really thought we could bring down Jesse Helms,” Vaughn wrote, “but we’re confident that we said to politicians: ‘It isn’t right to use my son as a means to an end…’”

There was a still a righteous indignation about Vaughn and Clarke, communicated (as proper southern ladies are wont to do) in barbs and thinly veiled insults.

Responding to a letter from an anonymous critic, Clarke cloaked her response in mock-appreciation: “Thank you for showing me the face of fear.”

When a frustrated Clarke once asked Vaughn what it might take to end the hate, homophobia, and prejudice, Vaughn replied matter-of-factly, “Embalming fluid.”

Helms did not seek re-election in 2002 due to worsening health. Later diagnosed with vascular dementia and failing memory, he died in 2006.

Vaughn’s efforts over the years didn’t go unnoticed in the LGBTQ+ community.

“She took on the whole world,” Paul Otto said as he looked back. “She was absolutely fearless.”

“There was so much about her work that was significant,” Art Sperry added. “It grew out of the AIDS crisis, but rather than walk away, she took up    the fight.”

Tony Burden agreed, noting: “What was so beautiful to see was how—after the death of both her husband and her son—she became fully her own person, not defined by her relationship        with anyone.”

Honey, We’ve Come too Far…

Even in the early 2000’s, Vaughn felt her and Clarke’s efforts afforded a brighter future.

“So much good information is all around us,” Vaughn wrote, “that to deliberately ignore it or purposely turn our backs is willful ignorance.”

Eloise Vaughn remains in touch with many of her LGBTQ+ friends.

“At my funeral, the majority of the people there will be gay people—mostly gay men,” Vaughn says with a smile. “They are my best friends.”

And if the saga seems cinematic, it’s not been lost Hollywood. “Once in a while, somebody will want to do a movie treatment of the book,” Burden said, “so, some producer will come talk with Eloise.”

“Here are two souls who found a way to speak, then shout, and finally…create a kid of moral vocal music,” Gurganus wrote. “It’s a cry of pain—both tin-pan alley and pure hymn. And may it become a ‘standard’ for those forced to act, answer, and grow. Because they could not stop loving.”

A stately grandfather clock across Vaughn’s room chimes at 47 minutes past the hour, which she casually dismisses. This place, like Eloise Vaughn, is sacred and timeless.

“There will always be prejudice,” Vaughn laments now, “but it’s nothing like the 1960’s or even when my son Mark was sick.

“You can’t stop prejudice. You’ll always have it—always—but, honey, we have come too far to go back.”

Photos courtesy of the Vaughn family.