Essays Archives

In Memoriam: A Love Letter to Wig Master Rosalie Jacques of Rosalie’s New Looks

29Jan

By Juanita MORE!No Comments

Essays, Hyperlocal News + Stories, Queerness

In Memoriam: A Love Letter to Wig Master Rosalie Jacques of Rosalie’s New Looks

She was a true quintessential San Francisco character I first met Rosalie in 1993, when I visited her wig and hair salon, Rosalie’s New Look's, in North Beach. After moving to San Francisco from Stockton in 1957, fresh out of beauty school, Rosalie quickly found her place doing hair. She soon opened her own shop, making wigs for the drag queens at Finnocchio’s nightclub and styling the topless dancers of North Beach. When topless entertainment became legal in the early 60s, she recalled the famous stripper Carol Doda visiting her shop and jumping into the window full of wigs and starting to strip. Rosalie also crafted merkins for dancers during that time to comply with legal restrictions. She proudly did hair for Charles Pierce, who preferred to be known as an actor rather than a femal...

Coincidence Will Be Charlie Kirk’s Deplorable Legacy

17Sep

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Essays, Feature Pieces

Coincidence Will Be Charlie Kirk’s Deplorable Legacy

And the fortuitous irony that led him to be gunned down on a school campus. 31-year-old Charlie Kirk died on September 10th, 2025. The prominent right-wing influence was at the University of Utah as part of his “The American Comeback Tour”; it was the tour's first stop and was preemptively boycotted by thousands of university students. Underneath a canopy tent with the words “PROVE ME WRONG” banded across, Kirk was shot in the neck by a single bullet fired by somebody atop a roof roughly two football field-lengths away; videos shared on social media captured the exact moment Kirk was assassinated, blood gushing out of his neck as his body limped. Kirk will be remembered by his wife, former Miss Arizona USA Erika Frantzve, their two children, both of whose names remain private, and the...

Fuck It, Be Selfish These Next Four Years

12Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Essays, Feature Pieces

Fuck It, Be Selfish These Next Four Years

'But not at the expense of our democracy and the well-being of the most vulnerable among us.' We fought, damn hard. The hopium we poured into glasses and chilled in fridges waiting for the election results to be called on November 5th turned sour, oxidized by the truth at hand: a twice-impeached felon, outright misogynist was chosen over one of the country’s most qualified presidential candidates in modern history, who just so happens to be a women, to guide the free world. Unlike 2016, this defeat feels different. We find ourselves in an uncanny valley of sorts, the mirror in front of us unsmudged and crystalline. This is who we are. There’s no denying it. It's not it is what it is. Rather it’s more insidious: It is what it has been all along. There are just bad, horrible, trite,...

12Nov

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Essays, Feature Pieces

Yes, It Does Feel Different This Time

I haven't slept much this past week. You haven’t either. For those of us old enough to cast our ballot for the first female presidential nominee now eight years ago, the déjà vu is palpable; I can almost choke on the irony. How we all went into that day glassy-eyed and optimistic of a woman breaking the toughest, tallest glass ceiling in the developed world. She didn’t; we cried and fell into dystopianism and a sea of what-ifs. Last Tuesday felt no different — except it now entirely does. The blind naivety palpated in 2016 conceded to ugly truths by 2020. We knew what this man was capable of. How he acted around those close to him was vile. His xenophobia ran rife through his base. Grabbing women by the pussy was, by all accounts, acceptable acts from the sitting leader of the f...

On the Otherside (of Ina Coolbrith Park in San Francisco)

9Jul

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Essays, Hyperlocal News + Stories

On the Otherside (of Ina Coolbrith Park in San Francisco)

San Francisco's seemingly petite urban park, which is among the City's steepest greenspaces, is big on contemplation ... sat among gorgeous vistas of downtown San Francisco. I lay my head on clear blue skies that paint Ina Coolbrith Park and remind myself How lucky, (fortunate), I am to have this summertime tan If I linger on a park bench too long, I think how grateful I am to let my skin wrinkle with smile lines and crows feet Inside a city, I will always see it as a part of my soul. If I’m mild and patient enough, I'll let my heart flutter in the passing clouds of lovers and friends, of friends who became lovers, of lovers who became friends; of the love around me, that gets me through hard things that bend things then ...

On My First Months-Long Mental Health Breakdown in San Francisco

5Jun

By Matt Charnock2 Comments

Editors' Picks, Essays, Feature Pieces

On My First Months-Long Mental Health Breakdown in San Francisco

What began as a series of ruminations spiraled into months defined by intrusive thinking that left me exhausted, demoralized, and with a new diagnosis. “If we titrate any further up, we’ll have reached the recommended medical maximum limit for sertraline,” my psychiatrist tells me. His voice is harmonic and consoling. There’s a sense of deafening pragmatism. “We can try increasing the dosage, but I recommend journaling your moods over the next four to eight weeks, so we can see how you’re adjusting.” The past three months felt like suffering the tiniest of deaths. March was when I noticed things around me were in flux, but they weren't ashen; the acrid taste of chard carbon is a sensation I associate with depressive spells. Flowers still had color, vivacious as ever. I found small joys...

My Mom’s Hands and the Stories of Strength They Told

8May

By Juanita MORE!No Comments

Editors' Picks, Essays, Hyperlocal News + Stories

My Mom’s Hands and the Stories of Strength They Told

It's been almost thirty years since my mom passed away. She was loving, protective, funny, and always the life of the party. Mom was born to a family of immigrants from Chihuahua, Mexico, during the Depression of the 1930s in Niles, California. The little town of Niles had peaked as the "Hollywood of the Silent Film Era." Around this time, many Mexican Americans were facing threats of deportation and struggling to find work amidst the era's job crisis and food shortages. I'm not sure how my grandparents arrived in California, but I heard rumors that my great-grandfather worked as a railroad conductor for a company that traveled through the Southern states. Beatriz was the sixth of nine children –– and fifth of the girls. As the youngest of the girls, it was apparent that she was wel...

Remembering When the ‘Person of the Year’ Award Should’ve Gone to Tesla’s Fremont Factory Workers

4May

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Essays, Hyperlocal News + Stories

Remembering When the ‘Person of the Year’ Award Should’ve Gone to Tesla’s Fremont Factory Workers

The East Bay manufacturing Tesla employees reportedly made between 44K and 70K a year in 20202 — about .00001% of Elon Musk’s documented earnings at the time. *This article was originally posted in 2020 but has since been removed from its previous publication and published on Underscore... in light of Tesla's recent decision to lay off 10% of its global workforce, which includes some 3,300 California-based employees. Time’s “Person of the Year’’ award has become something of a contentious calendar staple. The first individual to receive the award 94 years ago in 1927 — which, at that time, was called “Man of the Year,” because misogyny runs as deep as it does long in this county — was aviator Charles Lindbergh for his historic trans-Atlantic flight. (It was ...

The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived [in San Francisco]

2May

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Editors' Picks, Essays, Hyperlocal News + Stories, Queerness

The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived [in San Francisco]

Heartbreak feels good in a city like this... especially when one can warp inspiration from a new Taylor Swift song to fit their happenstance wretchedness. It’s 11:09 p.m. when I find my thumb hovering over our iMessages. All of them have been deleted. Twice. Thrice. I’ve restored them all. Every time. Like how I wanted my faith in you to resurrect; my longing for you to do the right thing. In light of everything that once sparkled now faded into the fog of friendship. All I do is sit here and wonder if any of it was genuine fiction. You put my kindness on refrigerator magnets, my patience spearing me with safety pins. Starry-eyed under city lights. Drunk on the guys who ghosted you. High on the victimhood you spun into cotton candy. I won't miss what we had or what we could’...

Biting My Tongue Underneath San Francisco Fog

30Apr

By Matt CharnockNo Comments

Essays, Queerness

Biting My Tongue Underneath San Francisco Fog

San Francisco's marine layers can meet universal sensations in the most happenstance, poetic moments. The drink sweats as you hum on about three weeks spent in France; Paris, to be exact — a city bathed in passion and fondness San Francisco starts to vanish beneath the fog I notice looking out that window off Castro Street My eyes return to your dimples, cavernous; I want to see myself getting lost in them how my face would fold into yours; the way butterfly wings meet one another come warm summer days atop bluebonnet fields All I can think about is how the one before you met me in a chrysalis — spinning each other into madness, clung together by conversations that left my thumbs aching; my lips wet with one too many gin and s...