One of the first big efforts was the "blue-square" campaign the following year. While the right-wing groups said their blue squares were meant to advocate "family values," they were widely interpreted as a strong antigay statement. Homosexuals in Nazi Germany were forced to wear pink triangles as identifying badges and the symbol has since been reclaimed by gay rights activists.

Anderson first mentioned conducting a blue-square campaign in the spring of 1990. In the end, it was AALARM that began postering the campus with blue squares in October of that year. Members of AALARM also chalked blue squares on the side-walks of Harvard Yard and around the houses. All this occurred the day before the National Bisexual Gay and Lesbian Scholars Conference was to begin at Harvard.

"It was beautifully timed. The right wing on this campus really knew how to get the media," says Allen, who suddenly found herself appearing on the front page of the New York Times Education section and taking calls from the Associated Press about the event.

Allen says that the protest by AALARM took on particular significance for her because she had only recently found out about black triangles--the symbol the Nazis assigned to lesbians. She says that she had previously felt somewhat removed from the emotional impact of the pink triangles.

"Seeing the blue squares was--Oh my God, it might have been me," says Allen, recalling that she had difficulty walking around the Yard for fear of seeing another blue square. "It was a feeling of 'these people don't know me and they're saying I can't exist.'"

ALLEN says she was unhappy about her involvement with BGLSA that year. It took a great deal of time in a year in which she was taking four and a half classes and had serious time commitments to two other organizations.

"What I really wanted to do--and did--was found a feminist magazine," Allen says of her sophomore year. "And that was 'the rag.'"

In the fall of her sophomore year, a friend of Allen's told her of another woman who had been talking about doing something similar and "all of a sudden, eight people were saying, 'let's do this.'"

Allen says they were concerned that Lighthouse, the women's magazine that was also just starting up, wasn't willing to come out and take a strong feminist position. Their first meeting also occurred around the time that Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 was coming under fire for remarks he made about the difficulty of adjudicating date rape. Allen thinks the protests surrounding his remarks helped draw people to the first meeting of the rag.

From the beginning, 'the rag' attracted controversy for its deliberately anti-establishment structure. The magazine is run by a "collective" of students, a move Allen says was sparked by the founders desire to avoid the traditional hierarchy of most publications.

"The thing about 'the rag' was that there was always two things going on," says Allen. "There was the experience of working as a collective as well as writing about feminist issues." The latter was seldom as easy as it may have seemed to outsiders, according to Allen.

"The first forum was really heavy," she recalls. "All the divisions in feminism came up--race, class, sexual orientation a little bit."

The content of 'the rag' has also been highly controversial. The first issue included a personal story of date rape that Allen says she and others worried would have negative repercussions for the woman who wrote it. The actual result, she says, was that in the next issue they were overwhelmed by people wanting to write about having been abused.

This led to a worry that they would develop a reputation as "the meest magazine," as Allen puts it. Allen says they were concerned that the emotional impact of some of the pieces would be lessened by cliched articles. "You know, 'all these really horrible things happened to me, but I am woman and I survived,'" explains Allen.

Allen speaks of 'the rag' in the past tense. Despite one controversial issue, none of the people involved with the rag will be here next year and Allen predicts the magazine's demise. Nevertheless, she is quite proud of it, calling it "a great feminist experiment."