By Melissa Karen Sances • Photos by Nikki Gardner Photography
Published In Northampton Living | April 2026

The Gayor of Northampton has some serious street cred. Clay Pearson didn’t just resurrect Pride in a sequined suit and knee-high silver stiletto boots – he won the respect of the actual mayor.

Following last year’s Hampshire Pride, Pearson received a handwritten note from Gina-Louise Sciarra, who had just been elected to her second term as Mayor of Northampton.

“Looking forward to four more years of sharing this job with my favorite Gayor,” she wrote in neat script.

On a recent Zoom call ahead of the fourth annual Hampshire Pride on May 2, Pearson, who uses he/she/they pronouns, held up the note, his dark green eyes flashing behind it, his handlebar mustache turned up into a smile. After returning the note to its rightful place on the refrigerator, he sat down in front of the camera and took a cinematic swig of Coke Zero from the bottle.

Pearson’s interview had been a year in the making, and she was ready. For the photo shoot, she curated five different outfits – each with corresponding, six- or seven-inch heels – within scenes that captured her personality. In the lead, for example, she would stand in a suit the exact color of her eyes, leaning over her pristine kitchen counter. All around her, drawers and cabinets would gape open, suggesting a contained chaos.

In the 11th grade in Panama City, Florida, Pearson told me, a language arts teacher had asked him to cite a quote to be remembered by. His fellow students selected passages from the Bible. Pearson wrote his own: “If you don’t like the truth, change it, not by saying but by doing.”

The doing is messy, of course, but the retelling is compelling. Pearson had aspired to be an engineer and follow his father into the military. He learned from his mother, a colonel’s wife, to be an excellent entertainer and inclusive host. He grew up to be an accomplished polymer scientist and a memorable drag queen who calls herself the “Inappropriate Pun Queen.” Then they founded Hampshire Pride, where thousands celebrate inclusivity flamboyantly and freely.

The truth is complicated – and it’s a hell of a story.

Moments of Truth

“My father and grandfathers were all colonels, so I grew up to be a disappointment,” said Pearson during our call. Many of their jokes are like that: spiky with a soft underbelly. After following his father, a graduate of West Point, to seven stations before graduating elementary school, he had mastered the art of making fast friends and “breaking the rules in a positive way.”

In Florida, where Pearson spent his high school years in the early aughts, no one talked about physical intimacy, let alone intimacy between gay people. He was perplexed by his mother’s gay best friend, who shared the bathroom with Pearson and his younger brother when he came to visit: “This man had every potion and tincture and cream. I now understand these problems as a 41-year-old gay man.” But then, he asked their mother seriously if her friend was “a metrosexual,” because that’s the word he’d heard on the radio.

Instead of hooking up with people or getting into drugs like many teenagers, Pearson came up with an act of rebellion like no other during one high school summer. Some days, he would skip his 6 a.m. swim practice and drive to a Walmart parking lot, where he rolled down the car windows and soaked in the sun until he fell asleep. Once rested, he would pop the trunk of his car, where a Tupperware container was sealed around a wrapped chlorine tablet. Before going home, Pearson rubbed the chlorine all over his towels and cloaked himself in the scent of pool water. He got away with it until the coach told his mom that he only showed up three out of five days of the week.

Pearson’s mother introduced him to the Emmaus United Methodist Church, where he sang in the choir. Soon a visiting choir director poached him for another denomination’s scholarship program. Now he was off to Grace Presbyterian in Panama City, where he rang hand bells and sang countertenor – like Justin Timberlake, delivered – for an associate’s degree at Gulf Coast State College before transferring into the University of Florida, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in material science and engineering and went on to work for Air Force Research Labs.

In the summer of 2008, right before moving to Massachusetts for graduate school, they came out.

Coming Home

Following his last undergraduate semester, Pearson met his future drag mother, Isis Vermouth, in a park in Panama City. That August, it just so happened that Vermouth was heading north to return to New York, and Pearson was planning a road trip with four friends – some whom they were out to, and some whom they weren’t – on their way to grad school for polymer science and engineering at UMass Amherst. But after proposing that they all drive together, Vermouth decided to go solo, only to break down in South Carolina.

Before Pearson and their crew could rescue Vermouth, they felt compelled to come out to two of their friends, “so they could run interference if Isis was being too flamboyant.” But Vermouth was not in drag and joined the crew as Adolfo, who Pearson said presents as more masculine than he does, except for an occasional high-pitched, “witchy” giggle. During the night the crew stopped for gas at a rest stop crowded with trucks, and Adolfo reached over and blasted the horn, tittering then ducking down in the passenger seat while Pearson got the stink eye.

“The guy looks at me, in his big, ol’ pick-up truck with raised, huge tires,” he remembered. “This is the moment I was worried about.”

Thankfully, they all left unscathed. “It was a comedy of errors,” said Pearson. “I drove a U-Haul through New York City in 7 a.m. rush hour traffic so we could drop him off. That’s what life’s about: overextending yourself and having a story to tell.”

Ironically, once in Amherst, the progressiveness that Pearson had anticipated after years in the South wasn’t in the Pioneer Valley, at least not where they could see it. At school, they had been accepted into UMass Amherst’s doctoral program, where they were the only gay person in a program of 125 people.

“It was not quite affirming of my new identity,” they said. “Everyone enjoyed me at a party; everyone forgot to invite me to a party.” They found themselves drawn to the night life in Albany, N.Y., where Vermouth opened their eyes to Thirsty Thursdays at ROCKS. By 2009, when they attended her first Pride Parade in Northampton, the Inappropriate Pun Queen had surfaced in their mind. She didn’t yet have a name, but she was starting to find a home.

“In drag, I was capable of being a different character,” said Pearson. “I was my own person, just on steroids. I could get away with the insane things I wanted to say or do and be like, ‘Look at me: I look this silly. You can’t trust what I’m saying.’ I was willing to be the butt of the joke.”

A Blank Canvas

Pearson got their master’s degree but left the Ph.D. program, only to return to UMass Amherst for a second master’s in business administration in 2014. Often, while walking through campus, they passed a chemistry lab undergoing a renovation. They witnessed the process in stages: workers taking the stuff out, then putting it all back into the old space, which was now entirely new.

After the project had supposedly been completed, they saw something forgotten in front of the door. It was a three-foot canvas with a “texture like Jupiter,” said Pearson. “It was stripey and swirly.” After months passed and the canvas remained unclaimed, a friend told them that it was their birthday present.

Pearson, who has painted ever since, began to explore her own sparkly canvas. “I was always naming myself inappropriate puns after what I was wearing,” she said. Once she donned all purple and called herself “Violet Disregard.” Another time, as “Aretha Spruce,” she built an elaborate base with tomato cages and Christmas garland and secured it to herself with a pair of suspenders. In 2013 Pearson joined the “Inappropriate Pun Team” for trivia at the World War II club, and she took the moniker and ran with it as fast she could in heels. On the day the state shut down in 2020, she was a sassy nurse whose badge read “Cora Navares.”

The coronavirus silenced Pride in Northampton, then called Noho Pride, until Pearson founded Hampshire Pride in 2023 with the help of Celina Almendarez and Kayla Abney. They resurrected and redefined the event in nine weeks and even got a shout-out on the Rachel Maddow show.

Now in its fourth year, Hampshire Pride is an all-day affair including a rally, a parade, entertainers on two stages in front of 130 pop-up tents, and an after-hours bar crawl. This year’s Pride will take place on May 2 starting at 11 a.m.

The event’s success is what ultimately landed Pearson their newest name. “I’m over the top and I seem to run everything because when people don’t, I do,” they said. “Somebody finally told me, ‘You’re the Gayor of Northampton.’”

It sounds so obvious, and it’s another moniker they’ve run with. But it can be painful to sprint in heels. Honestly, sixteen hours of walking with pride warrants a little rest.

When the mayor sent Pearson her note, she thanked her for understanding how hard their job was.