From Amazon.com
When Patsy Clarke and Eloise Vaughn brought together a group of North Carolina women mourning their sons' deaths of AIDS, they little realized that they would become political activists, and would found an organization to oppose the 1996 reelection of Jesse Helms to congress. Angry talk started to flow, someone wrote a check, and Clarke ran to get a clean pickle jar from the kitchen for donations: "We didn't really know what we were doing. We were just driven by primal emotions." Although Mothers Against Jesse in Congress failed to convince Jesse Helms to tone down his anti-gay rhetoric or alter his stance on funding for AIDS research, Patsy and Eloise did get to present their case to the 1996 Democratic convention, appear in
People magazine (garnering a huge pile of mail both for and against their cause), and experience enormous personal growth. Conservative women liberalized by the loss of their sons, Clark and Vaughn tackle anti-gay politics in the way that we all hope our mothers will stand up for us in our absence.
--Jack Connolly
From Publishers Weekly
"As for Mark, I wish he had not played Russian roulette with his sexual activity," declared Sen. Jesse Helms to Patsy Clarke, a long-time friend and political supporter, after she wrote him about her son's death from AIDS. Her world and political sensibilities shaken, Clarke, along with her new friend Eloise Vaughn, who had also lost a son named Mark to AIDS, formed Mothers Against Jesse in Congress (MAJIC), a national group of women dedicated to both raising awareness about AIDS and removing Helms from office. MAJIC quickly garnered writeups in People and the New York Times, and Clarke and Vaughn were invited to speak at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. Written (in conjunction with Nicole Brodeur, metro columnist for the Seattle Times) in plain, honest prose, the story is not so much about AIDS, or even politics, but about how two similar yet different women Clarke, a religious conservative Republican, and Vaughn, a religious Southern Democrat grow, as individuals and as a united team, questioning their past beliefs and prejudices and engaging with the world in a new and powerful way. There are shocking moments of pain as when the local funeral home refuses to take Clarke's son's body, telling her, "[T]his funeral home doesn't handle deaths by AIDS" but also moments of quiet insight, as when Clarke, taking the campaign to a gay bar, realizes that her son would have felt more comfortable there than at home. While occasionally edging toward the teary, Clarke and Vaughn's story is a powerful lesson in how personal experience can be the root of political change. (May)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
