The many selves of Gearóid Dolan
MIT instructor, activist, and costumed artist: Dolan calls their varied identities ‘projections into the world’ and explores them in an ongoing online project
By Cait McQuaid
The Boston Globe
Gearóid Dolan has many roles: a tech-savvy activist artist; a costumed artist who shows up at parades and nightclubs as alter ego Gerhardt DeKunst; an advocate for LGBTQ+, immigrant, and disability rights who recently received MIT’s RISE award for excellence in diversity and inclusion; and a jujitsu sensei/coach. Dolan calls their varied identities “projections into the world,” and “interviews” them in their online project, “Fractured Selves.”
How they started:
Dolan found a home as a teen in Dublin’s 1970s punk movement, where fashion, music, political statements, and performative street intervention were all intertwined.
“I started doing live performance when I was 16. I had a stage name called Any Droid. At the time, there wasn’t any category or word for nonbinary people. My stage name was based on the notion of androgyny,” they said.
“It wasn’t until recently that the category of nonbinary, gender fluid suddenly became available to me,” they added. “I spent my whole life saying, ‘There is no category for me. I don’t seem to exist on any metric.’ I’m very black-and-white and opinionated when it comes to politics and ethics. But when it comes to my gender identity, I live in ambiguity.”
