I recently had a researcher looking for women of color riot grrrl musicials. Michelle Gonzales writes that Spitboy wasn't a riot grrrl band, but I still wish I'd pointed the researcher Gonzales's way.
Even more recently Gonzales, who I will now call Michelle and I traded perimenopause zines. I'll review her zine here before too long, too...
The Spitboy Rule is memoir-ish, in the form of vignettes from Michelle's--or should I say Todd because that was her musician name?--life drumming with the band Spitboy (and occasionally other bands), a women's punk band out of the SF Bay Area. Michelle/Todd grew up in town a couple hours east of San Francisco, and unlike her fellow musicians, was working class and Xicanx, demographics that weren't typically addressed directly. It was an age of "not seeing color," and in fact a white riot grrrl, not seeing Todd's brownness criticized Spitboy for titling one of their songs Mi Cuerpo Es Mio, saying the band was appropriating Latinx culture.
Fave Spitboy moment: during between songs political banter a punk boy shouts out "Ah, quit your bitching and play some music." Guitarist Karin Gembus retorts "Hey, you know what you need to do? You need to go to the library and read a fucking book."
Fave Spitboy photograph: the band in Australia, Todd kissing a koala bear.
The stories and photos are fun, but the power of Michelle's memories is of her integrating and putting forth her multiple identities: poor, punk, reader, woman, and Xicana.
Extra cred: Mimi Thi Nguyen, editor of 1997's Evolution of a Race Riot and now a badass academic wrote the preface and Martín Sorrondeguy of Los Crudos the foreword.