A Portrait of Student Activism in 1992. From 1988 to 1992, I was a student at Bates College. It is a small, liberal arts college in Lewiston, Maine. Lewiston was a mill town in decline at the time, which had only one textile mill still operating. Drugs, crime and unemployment were high at the time (as they were in many American cities in the early 90s). By contrast, the wealth and privilege of Bates College was conspicuous and embarrassing. A lot of activism happened on campus in those years. We organized a chapter of the Democractic Socialists of America (DSA) and launched a series of protests against the first Gulf War in which the US occupied Kuwait and parts of southern Iraq under George HW Bush. A group of six of us were arrested for a sit-in at the local armed forces recruiting office. Despite our protests and others across the country, that war happened quickly and was sold as a clean and tremendously successful by the media. Many of us became disillusioned with our traditional protests which seemed to have been too easily ignored. We eventually grew tired of didactic politics and some of us began to experiment with street theater and performance art. Those years were also a time when gender, race, and sexual orientation were front and center in campus politics at Bates and across the country. The AIDS epidemic was in full swing and the gay/lesbian community had become mobilized and visible, and open discussions about gender, sex, identity, and sexual orientation ...