On a rainy Saturday in early June, Temple Bar’s streets are busy with tourists clutching takeaway coffees and clattering suitcases over cobblestones. Halfway down Aston Place, however, a sudden wash of colour breaks the usual palette of brick and slate. With its entire facade painted a saturated electric blue, the Queer Hawk hair salon is impossible to miss.
Step inside and you’ll find something between a neighbourhood barbershop, a community centre and an art installation. The ceiling is painted pink; a mirrored disco ball hangs above rose-pink barber chairs trimmed with gold, and the barber stations are crowded with pomades, shears and pride-flag fans, and stickers that proclaim: “God said Adam and Eve so I did both.” A Barbie doll stands guard on the coffee station, her arm frozen in a pageant wave, a badge pinned to her plastic lapel declaring the pronouns “She Her Hers”. It’s clear this isn’t your typical Dublin barber’s.
Waiting clients sink on to a dusky pink bench beside a magazine rack stocked not with GQ or red tops but dog-eared issues of GCN (Gay Community News) and Health Matters. Posters layer the walls in a kind of paper mosaic. One, splashed in rainbow hues, reads, “‘Even if you’re not sure what to say. We want to hear from you’ – National LGBT Helpline.” Another shows forks painted in rainbow colours: “Is your eating overwhelming you?” – a reminder that the Outhouse LGBTQ+ Centre hosts Overeaters Anonymous every week. Beside the register, business cards offer practical advice on how to access free at-home STI testing.
And then there are the walls: one entire span is given over to a mural of the word “Resilience” which sits atop the shop’s namesake logo – part hawk, part heart, part triangle – ringed by portraits of queer luminaries including Marsha P Johnson, and Irish HIV activists Dr Robbie Lawlor and drag queen Veda Lady. In another corner, illustrations for sale by Dublin-based artist Gabe Marques depictmuscular mermen locked in an underwater kiss, one torso tattooed with phrases like “No H8″, “Remember Stonewall”, and the single-word command “Respect”.
Standing at the centre of the salon is its co-founder Kiro Rodrigues, wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the phrase “PROTECT THE DOLLS”, the slogan popularised when American designer Conner Ives ended a runway show last February wearing a white T-shirt bearing those exact words, a message of solidarity with trans women, affectionately known in queer slang as “the dolls”.
“Coffee?” he offers, gesturing toward the Barbie sentinel. In conversation he speaks with the earnestness of someone still surprised to find an idea that recently lived in his head is now out in the real world.
“I was doing a marketing course during the pandemic. I had to create a fictitious company as part of the assignment. My husband Thiago [Mulligan] and I got talking about our experiences getting our hair cut. The idea initially was to create a gay barbershop based on our own experiences as a gay couple.
“I often felt uncomfortable being asked if I had a girlfriend, or what football team I supported. I’d get stared at if I didn’t fit the ‘norm’ and I’d feel like I had to come out, again and again, every time I’d get a haircut.
“We started thinking: wouldn’t it be cool if someone actually did this for real? And then that turned into the question, ‘Why don’t we do it?’, because nobody else was doing anything like this. And then, once we started researching, we realised there was a massive gap. There was a whole community in need of a space like this.”
While neither partner came from a beauty-industry background, Rodrigues says they were painfully familiar with the small humiliations that can come with a routine haircut when you do not fit typical salon expectations.
“We heard so many stories, especially from trans and non-binary people, about people being refused service point blank. Places saying, ‘we only cut men’s hair’ or ‘we don’t do women’s hair’. It’s all gendered and categorised and if you didn’t fit into that, there isn’t a space for you.”
So the couple devised one. They named it after an Irish expression, “quare hawk”, a gentle tease for an oddball. When the salon opened its doors last October, the owners braced for a trickle of curious walk-ins. Instead, they got a flood.
“It’s completely exceeded our expectations; it’s taken on a life of its own. It’s almost a movement at this point,” says Rodrigues.
“When we first opened, it was just me and one barber, and there were days when it was only the two of us sitting here, waiting. Now we’re flat out all the time and people are travelling from all over just to come to us, which absolutely blows my mind. I never imagined that, at this stage, we’d be this busy.”
“It’s a small thing, but it makes a big difference,” Rodrigues says. “Getting your hair cut can feel almost like going to the dentist for some people. We try to be a safe space because getting your hair cut shouldn’t be stressful.”
The price list also resists binary logic: charges are tiered by hair length and complexity rather than “men’s” versus “women’s”. That simple tweak draws clients from across Ireland who have spent years being charged extra or turned away entirely for wanting a specific hairstyle.
“We do everything,” Rodrigues says, gesturing toward the motley group of customers currently getting their hair cut.
“But one thing that’s been really powerful is the gender-affirming cuts we’ve done, like people getting a more masculine cut for the first time. And with those transformations there’s been laughs, tears and emotion.
“Just to see the change from when they came in the door, quite nervous, and then to see them relax a bit more and the pure joy they got from seeing themselves at the end in the mirror.”
Much of that alchemy today is performed by barber Andy, who is busy fixing the final strands on a client’s newly sculpted cut.
“I’ve been cutting hair and barbering for a while now. I used to work in a pretty well-known chain of traditional men’s barbershops, very masculine, very standard. And as a queer person, it never really felt like I was seen or heard or represented,” he says in between appointments.
“So, to be working somewhere like this – a place where the clients and the people around me look like me, sound like me, think like me – it makes such a huge difference.”
Andy’s chair is a place where conservative ideas of “barbering” dissolve.
“Lots of mullets, shag cuts. But also stuff that’s hard to even name, like when someone brings in three totally different reference photos and says, ‘Can you combine these?’ And I’m like, ‘Sure, let’s figure it out,’” he laughs. “You get requests here that break the mould of what barbering should be.”
More profound than aesthetics for him too, though, are gender-affirming haircuts.
“We’ve had people come in for their first queer haircut, or their first gender-affirming haircut. That’s always really lovely,” he says. “I know first hand how hard it can be to walk into a space, knowing that how you look doesn’t match who you are, and trying to explain that to someone who just doesn’t get it, especially if they’re not queer.”
In places Andy worked before, clients sometimes refused his service based on his appearance.
“In my old job, I’d have people say, ‘I don’t want you to cut my hair,’ just because of how I looked. Like, because I didn’t have a skin fade myself, they assumed I couldn’t do one,” he recalls. “Here, that doesn’t happen. There’s no expectation that how I look dictates what I can do. Everyone’s on the same level, and that makes all the difference.”
It would be easy to assume Queer Hawk caters exclusively to LGBTQ+ patrons but, in reality, Rodrigues says the salon welcomes hair of all orientations.
“Even straight couples sometimes come in – our allies,” he laughs. “People assume we’re not ‘straight friendly’ or that we’re exclusive in some way. But we’re very much open to everyone.”
What unites the clientele is not necessarily their orientation or gender but a desire for a space where appearance changes can unfold without criticism. For trans people in particular, a dramatic haircut often marks a momentous milestone.
“For someone transitioning, appearance is a big part of their transition and presenting yourself to the world,” he explains. “Having somewhere where they’re not afraid to ask for what they want or know that the person who is going to cut their hair is even going to understand what they’re asking for, having a place like that is important.”
Rodrigues still hears with disbelief how frequently clients have been turned away elsewhere.
“When you say it out loud it seems like something from 40 years ago,” he says, shaking his head. “It doesn’t sound like something that happens now, but it does happen. And it’s not only with trans people; we’ve had lots of lesbians with shorter hair who’ve had bad experiences in salons that didn’t know what to do with them.”
Social media has become Queer Hawk’s unofficial third co-founder, beaming queer hair styles to the phones of would-be clients across Ireland at a moment when the country’s bricks-and-mortar queer scene is thinning out.
On TikTok alone the barbershop has racked up hundreds of thousands of views in under a year, turning its feed into a neon sign that flashes far beyond Temple Bar’s footfall. That digital reach feels vital at a time when LGBTQ+ venues keep disappearing: Dublin’s much-loved but short-lived bar All My Friends shut its doors in January last year after just 18 months of trading; Galway institution Bar Nova poured its last pint the following September; and Dublin’s boundary-pushing arts night Sam’s Collective bowed out last June, moving online to a Discord server after organisers said the events had become “unsustainable”.
Even corporate support is wobbling: as reported in this newspaper in recent weeks, more than a quarter of US multinationals that previously helped fund Dublin Pride have pulled their sponsorship, spooked by political headwinds against DEI programmes back home.
[ A quarter of major US corporate backers pull out of Dublin Pride over Trump fearsOpens in new window ]
Against that backdrop, every viral haircut and barber profile Queer Hawk uploads online acts as a lighthouse for Ireland’s LGBTQ+ community – proof that while physical queer spaces may close, new communities can still gather and grow.
“The reaction online has been insane. The shop is essentially an influencer,” Rodrigues says. “We’ve always been tongue-in-cheek and a little bit sassy online. Overall, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. TikTok and Instagram have been essential, probably 80 per cent of new clients found us there.”
With demand far outstripping their Temple Bar studio’s size, the pair are planning a larger Liffey Street premises with more floor space and, crucially, room for events.
“We have a regular open-mic night that happens monthly, and now we’re about to open a second, bigger salon on Liffey Street in the next couple of weeks,” Rodrigues says. “That’ll give us more space for more events.”
Cork, he hints, is next. But first, the team must survive the demands of clients during Pride month
“We are very busy and we’re marching in the Pride parade as Queer Hawk,” Rodrigues says. “We’re keeping it simple, just a group of us walking together with placards, a lot of pink and blue: protest vibes.”
Andy echoes the excitement.
“We’re going to be marching as part of the community hub – it just makes sense,” he says. “We’re Ireland’s first barbershop that is proudly, openly queer. It’s above the door, it’s who we are. In just eight months, we’ve built a real sense of community here. Like a little family, a little village. It’s beautiful.”
If Queer Hawk has a secret weapon, it might be its fiercely mundane admin choices: the pronoun field, the length-based price list, the “quiet cut” option. Each one dismantles tiny roadblocks that, added together, often deter queer clients from booking salon services.
“You can put whatever name you want us to call you by. That’s central to what we do here,” Rodrigues says. “Why? Because we want people to feel comfortable. We want to remove that awkwardness that can happen in more traditional spaces, where maybe the people working there are, let’s say, more traditionally minded.”
[ Why is Irish media so reticent about covering gender issues?Opens in new window ]
“So we try to normalise it from the start. We ask. We don’t wait for people to correct us. We want to avoid those moments where someone feels they have to bite their tongue because the wrong pronoun or name was used. We want to make sure people don’t have to go through that here.”
That’s the thing about Queer Hawk: it sells haircuts, yes, and art, and hosts queer community events, but mostly it sells permission. Permission to answer the question “Can I be wholly myself here?” with a resounding yes, whether you are a trans woman seeking your first pixie, a non-binary teenager experimenting with colour, or a straight ally who simply prefers glitter in the air more than Premier League chat.
“It’s rewarding that we’re doing something that makes people feel good and makes them feel comfortable where they otherwise wouldn’t have,” Rodrigues says.
“It’s really gratifying to know that we’re creating a community and a space where people can let go of some of that anxiety, get their hair cut the way they want and leave feeling good about themselves.”
