Platinum Tornado
Platinum Tornado
(September's Cover)
Defiant, raucous, and constructed with grace and daring, September's cover hearkens back to the lampoon origins and performative roots of drag. It also revels in the delicious ridicule of hetero-normative convention, which for so long has denied anything different the right to exist, scorning that which deviated from its flat rules and bland logic. Aside from celebrating queer culture, Vigil's photograph is also packed with energy, bravado, and irreverent joy. The queen's laugh occurs as a resilient roar. The world is her court and all spectators bow dutifully. It is worth noting that photographer Vincent Vigil is both a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation and a drag queen who performed and photographed his subjects in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to complete his formal education in photography. ~ Brian Alessandro, Editor-in-Chief
Rialto Theater
Tucson, Arizona
2013
The Collection
Follow Us
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
~ James Baldwin
Help us spread the ethos of compassion and understanding by joining our social media networks and sharing generously!
Recent Literature
Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Drama
Apathy paralyzes. Disconnection troubles. But there is still a hopeful heartbeat resounding in the abyss.
The speaker concludes his revelatory memoir about appearances and prejudices with admonishments and frank comforts.
A rigorous and affectionate review of Roberto Carlos Garcia’s poetry collection, “Melancolia.”
In chapters 9-11 of Mark Elzey’s revelatory memoir, the narrator faces the defacers.
The speaker takes aim at pop psychology, the notion of inferiority complexes, and Chicago’s heinous “Ugly Laws.”
The memories threaten to cling and capture, but the rolling stone dodges all confinements.
A scholarly and thoughtful epistolary celebrating black female identity and inventorying the rousing literature it produces.
An inquiry into the enduring power of Shakespeare’s classic opens the castle gates to a battalion of existential musings.
Pick a fight, vent a gripe; never let an incisive judgment get away.
Conditions are placed on relationships and ideals of acceptable appearance are carelessly imposed.
Yearning and wrenching, the heart twitches and beats harder.
The ardent toil of a tiny colony fills a lumberjack with fascination, admiration, and self-reflection.
A profile in the shape of a case study probes the decaying and methodical mind of a misogynistic sociopath in a story written by a seasoned clinical psychologist.
Astronomy, David Bowie, Italian ancestry, the 2016 Election, and the bond between a man and his deceased father blend and surge.
A bridge between bigotries is built and the memoirist finds a life-altering clarity in his prejudice.
The New Engagement
The New Engagement endeavors a novel approach to discovering, introducing, and showcasing writers, artists, and filmmakers, by providing them digital and print platforms, while encouraging and supporting their social-consciousness.