on football as religion, embracing judaism, & visibilizing queerness: frankie de la cretaz in conversation with jeanna kadlec
on football as religion, embracing judaism, & visibilizing queerness: frankie de la cretaz in conversation with jeanna kadlec
Frankie de la Cretaz is writing the queer history we were never taught in school.
I first met Frankie when they reached out to me for an interview with NYLON Magazine about my at-the-time new LGBTQ+ focused lingerie boutique, Bluestockings Boutique. We were both living in Boston at the time, and met in person at a coffee shop to do the interview — what a meet cute. Which is to say: it’s been a minute for both of us, and now we’re here, and what a fucking joy to see how far they’ve come.
Frankie’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, ELLE, and more. Their debut, co-written with Lyndsey D’Arcangelo, Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League, is out now wherever books are sold.
This interview has been edited for length
Jeanna Kadlec: So I know and love you! But in the case that anyone who is reading this has not read your work before, can you introduce yourself?
Frankie de la Cretaz: I am a freelance writer, mostly writing at the intersection of sports, gender, and queerness. I'm predominantly a sportswriter, and I like to say that I write about sports for people who think they don't like sports, but I'm also an essayist, as well.
JK: Short and sweet, I love it. As a sidebar, I love that you say that you write about sports for people who don't think they like sports, because sports historically have been so important to me in my life, but I don't think of myself as someone who is “sporty” at all. Reading your work always harkens back to that heart-space, and I really love that.
FC: Thank you. [I remember] talking to you about the title of my book, which is Hail Mary. I'm Jewish, and I don't know what connotations people have with that term. And so I was like, “Are people going to think this is a Catholic book? What are people going to think?” Because of the work that you do and the space that you occupy, you're one of the people that I went to about that, and when you were reflecting on it, you said, “Well, football is America's religion.”
JK: Yeah.
FC: And I want to thank you for that because it opened up — you’re in my acknowledgments because it opened up this entire line of thought. In the book, there's an entire section in which I reflect on football culture, and I connect it — like, Game Day is a holy day, and we talk about the different ways that some people go to church and say their Hail Marys and others gather around the TV, hoping to see a different kind. There's this whole thread that ties through the book, and it was like that one line, that one thing that you said to me, and I was like, Oh my God, of course. And it really helped us bring it all together. So thank you so much for that.
JK: Well, I'm super honored to hear that. I'm really thrilled that it did all come together like that. Even that line that you're saying, like some people go to church and some people go to a stadium — that hits me in the gut.
I wanted to ask you if you can tell us about how Hail Mary came about, how this project began for you?
FC: It began as a joke. *chuckles* I don't watch football, right? So these 70-year-old women that I met through interviewing them for the book text me about the NFL every Sunday, and I don't have the heart to tell them that I literally don't watch football.
JK: To pause for our readers — can you mention the sports that you do cover?
FC: I predominantly cover baseball, specifically women and girls’, and the WNBA, and also queer and trans inclusion. I’m flexible in terms of what fits into the sports and gender bucket.
I used to be the sports columnist for Bitch Magazine, and I had a regular column. For football season, they wanted me to do something about the women who are currently playing in the semi-professional leagues that currently exist. And I'm a huge history nerd. Anyone who's read any of my work will see that I'm often incorporating a lot of historical stuff into what I do, and even if it doesn't end up in the final piece, it's really important for me to understand the historical context in which I'm writing. So I was like, oh, there's probably a book right about women and football? No. There's like, Hey, ladies, do you want to learn about football so you can watch it with your man because you're sick of losing him every Sunday? And I was horrified.
So Lyndsey, my co-author, is a football writer and a friend of mine from the sports writing world. And I'm angrily sending her like all these screenshots, and she's like, Well, clearly you need to write a book about women's football. And I said, Well, if I write it, you're writing it with me because I don't know anything about football. And then a friend of ours was like, Oh, my agent would like that project, and suddenly we were agented for the project.
This does not happen ever, right? We worked backwards. And as you know, our first proposal did not sell. It was a much more generalized women in women in football throughout history. But in the course of doing that research, we discovered this league, and I wrote a separate piece. I was also the Longreads sports columnist, and I wrote a piece for that, and I realized that there was a whole lot here that had never been touched, which is wild to me.
JK: You've had this really long and storied career in writing about so many other leagues, essentially and like I think of your incredibly viral piece on the queer history of women's baseball [about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League]. That piece that's just so resonant and what I always think about when I'm thinking about your work.
It’s so interesting for you to take those research skills that you've developed on these other beats and just assume that there's someone else in the world who's doing the work that you're doing — and there's not someone else in the world who's doing the work that you're doing in the way that you do it.
And then to have a book essentially just happen feels like a case of being very — at the risk of using New Agey type of language — just very aligned and like, you're doing the work already. The opportunity comes up. Right place. Right time. But also, you being the right person and actually putting in all of that work already and showing that you can show up for it.
FC: No, but it's totally how I feel about my entire writing career. Writing is a second career for me. It’s not what I went to school for. When we talk about spirituality, you know, I think that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Like, there's something about that for me that feels really true.
JK: So, what is spirituality to you in this moment?
FC: So I think it's twofold for me. The first is that when I think of what spirituality generally is for me, I think it's an attempt to connect to something larger than myself. For me, that's a process of humility, of humbling myself, bringing my ego down and like keeping me in check. That's really important for me as someone who came to spirituality through 12-Step Recovery, which is how I ended up here. So that humility feels necessary to that work to remind me that like, I am not God. I need those reminders, it turns out.
But there's this other piece for me that's connected to the Jewish parts of my spiritual practice that I see as efforts to connect with my ancestors, with my lineage, with my culture. Lately, I’ve been trying to do the work of merging the stuff I was taught in recovery with Jewish faith and beliefs, and also as I think about astrology and tarot and these other things. I’m doing research to figure out how they relate to Judaism, and which pieces are mine that don’t feel like I’m appropriating but help me feel connected to where I come from.
JK: That makes sense. The research piece, and knowing that you have a Virgo moon, makes this deep drive for organizing the information, for researching it and for creating the emotional and spiritual safety through the information — that makes total sense.
I also wanted to ask if parenting played a role in the merger of spirituality with creative processes?
FC: It played a role, I think, in bringing me back to Judaism because when I was pregnant, I realized I wanted my kid to have some sort of Jewish community, but also to understand what it meant. Also, this was right around the time that Trump was elected, and I felt the rising anti-semitism, so I definitely think it feels really important to me to teach my kids where they come from.
JK: Absolutely. I also wanted to pick up on what you were saying about incorporating Judaism with your creative practice, that you use astrology, tarot, and other practices or the religious ritual to organize a day, or to draw creative inspiration.
FC: I have ADHD, and I'm a very scattered person. Tarot is very helpful with [grounding] — pulling a card, lighting a candle, setting an intention. Those are things that help me a lot in coming to my creative space.
In some of my creative writing, I often will write and realize, oh, there's a lot of queerness here and there's like gender stuff is coming up, and then I take a step back from the work and I'm like, this is really fucking Jewish, and I'm not making that visible. So I'm really working on making the Jewishness visible in my work.
JK: Can you expand a little more on what you mean by making the Jewishness visible?
FC: An example: I'm working on this essay that I've been working on for a long time. It's about body hair, but specifically about armpit hair, and grappling with my own feelings about my body hair and historical tropes about feminists and lesbians and all of this.
I wrote this whole essay, and I was like, Wait a minute. Hairy Jews! Oh, wait, there's something really Jewish here that I'm not talking about, that I'm not acknowledging. So actually working back to then untangle even things like the internalized anti-semitism around that, that a lot of Jewish folks have that I think was required in order to assimilate [as] white.
Like, to assimilate, I was taught to have my eyebrows waxed and my upper lip waxed and hide my body hair and all of these things, which to some degree, anyone socialized as a girl is going to internalize. But there's something really specific around that as it relates to anti-semitism and assimilation that I think is unique.
JK: It’s interesting, too, that you called out the specific part in your writing process [where that realization happens] — that is the moment when you take a step back. I also wanted to ask about your writing process itself, what it looks like. Does it change from project to project? How does it feel to you?
FC: I'm a sprinter — and I will say I have a co-author who woke up every single day from the day we got our book deal and wrote every morning. I did not touch anything for six months, and then I wrote incessantly, and then I would break. When I'm writing long form projects, or even creative projects, writing retreats tend to be very helpful for me. This has been hard in the pandemic; I don't write well in my home.
But like, I wrote 20,000 words the week before our book was due, from the hours of 11pm to 5 or 6am. I had friends that would send me nudes when I met my writing goals. That was my accountability.
JK: I remember that!
FC: This is my very chaotic writing process. I light a candle. That's very important. It's something about the grounding sense that always helps. I light a candle, and I write at weird hours. But when it's flowing, it's flowing. I very much think that my writing process is one of not writing for very, very, very long periods of time. And when I finally sit down, it's because I already know where it's gonna go, and it all comes out pretty fully formed.
I know a lot of people do a lot of work in revision, and obviously I do as well, but I don't have the kind of extensive revisions that I know some other people have. And I think part of it is because I sit on it for so long that by the time I write it, it feels very formed.
JK: I so appreciate your transparency with this and also with sharing because I think there's such an idea around what writing a book is like, that it's this daily process and you get up early in the morning and you write ten hours a day, blah blah blah for years and years on end. And it's like, no, everyone's different and a process can look like yours. A process can look like Lyndsey’s. It can be anything in between.
I do relate strongly to what you're saying around, like needing to allow things time to bake. And not writing continually through the whole project and needing to take mental breaks to allow it to back burner in order to then come out in a more fully formed way. That makes complete sense to me.
FC: I think it's funny because if I were Lyndsey, I would have been — we were a week from deadline and 20,000 words were missing from my part of the book. I kept checking in. I had a lot of guilt and a lot of shame and felt a lot of responsibility and was like, Are you worried?
I couldn't have asked for a better co-author because she was like, Look, I have seen your finished work. So whatever your process is, it works for you. So I'm going to trust that your process will work because I've seen what you do. And I'm really grateful that I had the space to do that. But I do struggle with my own, I should be writing a thousand words a day or whatever it is.
But also, this book, I think, is different in a lot of ways than something that's like strictly memoir or fiction because it's so research based. I'm having to track down people and interview players, and every person you talk to adds something new to the story. It’s very, very hard to write your story before you've talked to everybody, because you don't know what you have yet.
JK: I do want to ask a little bit more about just creatively speaking — what inspires you?
FC: Writing women athletes back into the narrative; it felt important to visibilize the queerness that had been erased. From the jump, we knew it was going to be a gay book. Lyndsey is also gay, and there was no question that we were going to make these athletes’ queerness — not all of them, probably 50 to 70 percent of the women were gay — we wanted to make that visible. I'm really motivated by thinking about telling the stories of the people who have been there and how much they deserve to have those stories told.
During my writing process, I had photos of these women hanging on the wall in my office, and I regularly looked at them because I wanted to remember who I was writing about and in some ways, who I was writing for. Like I said, they text me on Sundays to talk about football, and one of them sent Lyndsey care packages while she was writing. They're so grateful that somebody is telling their story, and I take that really seriously. And so I think when I think about my creative process, I'm so moved by what these people did, and I think it's so important that people know about it, and I feel a lot of responsibility to do that story justice and to tell it well.
JK: And y’all have told it very, very well. Even reading the first few chapters, like — this is history that we never got, and that's so vital. It feels urgent while reading it. My last question, I think, is have you had any particularly magical creative moments this year?
FC: When I think about what feels magical to me when I'm in a creative process, again, because a lot of my work involves sourcing, for me, it's when the perfect source or the person you've been looking for for two years calls you out of the blue and it's like, Hi, I heard you've been looking for me.
We have a piece which by the time this runs, will have run in Sports Illustrated. So I can say it! It’s an excerpt that will be in the paperback; it’s not in the [hardcover] book. We found this after we finished the book and couldn't add it.
JK: I remember you tweeting something about this!
FC: Yes. It’s the story of this team who banded together and formed their own corporation to buy themselves from the corporation of men who owned them. They're fantastic.
I had interviewed one of the players and she was telling me about how most of the women were gay, and there was this local lesbian bar in Columbus that wanted to take out ad space in the program to support that. But they were billing themselves as family friendly entertainment, and they were really worried at the time that if they had a lesbian bar advertising in their program that they wouldn't sell any tickets. So I have that. I know I talked to the woman, and then I'm looking through like source documents, and I have a 15 year anniversary program for this team. They were the longest-running team in the league. They played from ‘74 to ‘88, the only team to do that. And it's their 1988 15th anniversary program. And I'm flipping through it and I come across a full page ad that says Summit Station Supports the Pacesetters, and it was the bar that they were afraid fifteen years ago to advertise in their program. And I just was like, Oh my God, they did it. Those are the moments. I get excited about the research — that's what feels like magic. You find those little pieces that the woman who told me they were afraid had no idea that 15 years later, that was in that program.
JK: It’s so emotional.
FC: I cried. Like, they did it.
I think something that you know — you talk about being from the middle of the country. When we talk about queer folks, it's so often the coast and it's a point we make in the book, which is the thing that these women were not living where Stonewall happened, right? Like, it wasn't their daily reality, but also they didn't want to jump on a bus for New York City. They’ve only ever been queer in Columbus, Ohio, and in Oklahoma City and in Dallas. Wherever they are, it's the only place they've ever been queer. It's the only place they want to be queer.
JK: They don't want to leave their home.
FC: And they have that community there. So I love finding that and seeing the ways they're being supported.
P.S. You can follow Frankie de la Cretaz and their co-author Lyndsey D’Arcangelo on Twitter, and be sure to order HAIL MARY from your local bookseller!
P.P.S. Year-long subscriptions for Astrology for Writers are on sale through the end of 2021! Support the newsletter and get all the fun extras!