‘Never, ever did I think we would win,” Ale, vocalist of the self-described “Sappho punk, spoken-word” trio the Fistys, said of last year’s Battle of the Fantasy Girl Bands competition at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett. “Our music was so out there.”
But win they did, and that battle, an annual fund-raiser for the Neo-Political Cowgirls, was both validation and catalyst, the band’s reputation quickly growing beyond the Springs resident’s expectations.
Also comprising the bassist Kathy Henderson, of Springs, and the drummer Christina Sun of East Marion, the Fistys (“a name shortened from a word that cannot be printed in newspapers,” The Star wrote in 2024) filmed a video at LTV Studios in Wainscott on April 16, plan to record their all-original music, and will again take the Talkhouse stage for this year’s Battle of the Fantasy Girl Bands, happening on June 1.
They have performed at The Church and the Masonic Temple in Sag Harbor, Dive Bar Pizza in Montauk, and the Clubhouse in Wainscott as well as UpIsland and at venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The band also hosts the monthly Glam Jam at the Masonic Temple and appeared in Philippe Cheng’s documentary film “The Sea We Wade.”
With song titles like “I Dissent!,” “I Can’t Breathe,” “KKK on Long Island,” “MAGA Mirror,” “Rambo Womb,” “Why Is Jesus White,” and “Sodomite Penguins in Central Park,” the Fistys are raw, unapologetic, and in your face. But “I don’t think of our music as being political,” said Ale, who grew up in a series of Bible Belt towns in the South and Midwest. “It’s just the truth.”
The subject matter, she said, is drawn from The New York Times, NPR, and the BBC. “I’m just the lesbian Anderson Cooper saying it like it is. Unfortunately, finding material in this current climate is too easy. I look forward to the day I don’t have to write songs like ‘I Can’t Breathe,’ ” which she said is about violence and murder inflicted on people of color, “Sodomite Penguins in Central Park,” about gun violence and the banning of books in schools, or “I Dissent!,” an indictment of “the rise of fascism and end of American democracy.”
The Fistys “don’t seek material,” Ale said. “The material finds them.”
“I’ve always been involved in social justice,” Ms. Henderson said. “Injustices drive me crazy — and to music!” In the 1980s, she co-founded GLSEN, an international organization dedicated to advancing safe-schools laws and policies and protecting students from bullying and harassment.
It may be uncommon, three women forming a punk-rock band following careers in education and the arts, but in hindsight it was perhaps inevitable. “I’m an Army brat,” Ms. Henderson said. “I grew up all over in a family dedicated to the arts. Dance and music were a big part of my hybrid, European upbringing.” She learned piano at an early age and studied at the Boston Conservatory, played clarinet in her high school’s marching band, “and was always playing around with different instruments.” From Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., she came to the Ross School in East Hampton “to help start the integrated wellness program and build the Wellness Center.” She teaches tai chi at LongHouse Reserve and the Y.M.C.A. RECenter here.
Ms. Sun, an illustrator and swim instructor, worked in art departments in New York City, primarily in publishing. Her musical background is also voluminous, having played the piano and the erhu, a Chinese two-stringed bowed instrument, from age 13. “My dad sang Peking opera as a hobby, so it was always playing at our home in Queens,” she said. She played guitar in an all-female band in high school, sang in a French go-go band in New York in the 1990s, and took up West African drumming in 2020.
As a child, Ale said, “I wanted so badly to play an instrument and study music.” Her father, however, did not allow her to join the marching band because “the uniforms were too masculine. Fast-forward, moving to the East End was a game-changer.” She and Ms. Henderson began hosting salons and playing avant-garde, spoken-word music, but “my real inspiration” came from a 1979 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which the late Gilda Radner portrayed a strung-out Patti Smith. “That’s what I wanted.”
Indeed, that blistering presentation is recalled when the Fistys take the stage, their performance as much a visual phenomenon as an aural one, the sound and fury a manifestation of their convictions. “I think some of my most important work came from the curriculum I wrote and designed for grades five to 12,” said Ale, who taught for 34 years, serving as director of multicultural education and community service in New England and New York. “The blatant white patriarchy taught in educational institutions was alarming. Slavery, the Wounded Knee massacre, and the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for instance, were a sidebar or completely omitted.” She also pointed to work she did for L.G.B.T. youth and their families on a grassroots level and with national organizations.
Ale attended several Battle of the Fantasy Girl Bands competitions “and was blown away by these bad-ass women. I was intimidated by these girl rockers.”
“A friend lent me his drum kit,” Ms. Sun recalled, “and I got to drum with Ur Mom, the band formed by the organizers of the Battle of the Fantasy Girl Bands. So fun! That is how I got to meet a lot of women musicians — like Fisty and Fisty,” as the bandmates call one another.
The annual event also drew Ms. Henderson into its orbit. “I got into the bass when Miss Vicious,” another all-female band, “asked me to join their kick-ass band and play at the Battle of the Fantasy Girl Bands about five years ago.”
The women had no expectation of winning the lighthearted competition. “I thought we were so different and out there that I couldn’t anticipate how we would be received,” Ms. Henderson said of the band’s performance of “Psycho Presidents.”
After drumming with Ur Mom and the Fistys, Ms. Sun set out for home in order to catch the last ferry to the North Fork that night. “But I listened to the show live, and heard the judges announce the first-place winner: ‘So original — and only three members!’ — and I wondered, ‘Really? There was another band with only three members?’ ”
As she rolled off the North Ferry into Greenport, her band’s name was announced as the winner. “I just laughed. ‘Where is your drummer?’ I heard them ask. It was so funny.”
“That night gave me incredible confidence,” Ale said, “and the desire to keep playing.”
“How many bands do you know that only have bass, drums, and lead singer?” Ms. Henderson asked. “In that way, we are punk. We write mostly about current events in a tragic/comedic way,” ranging from their contrarian take on pickleball to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“We are entertainers who have a lot of fun,” is Ms. Sun’s assessment of the Fistys, “and we want to make people dance, laugh, be happy, and stay together and be good to each other in the chaos and uncertainty. Of course, it is not easy,” she said. “Not at all. A work in progress.”
