When Penelope Spheeris heard that Tommy Lasorda passed away on Thursday at 93, she knew that the sad news would affect many people, especially in Los Angeles. The city has long been her home, and this is also where Lasorda became a baseball icon, leading the Dodgers to two World Series titles during his Hall of Fame career.
But Spheeris’ mind quickly turned to someone else in the Lasorda family she knew and missed: his son, Tommy Jr., known as Spunky, who was gay and died in 1991 at age 33 of AIDS complications. She cried.
“I always felt it had to be more public that Sr. had a son who was gay and beautiful and all that Tommy was,” she said in a telephone interview Saturday. “He was a very, very memorable person.”
There is much to remember about the longevity of Tommy Lasorda Sr. in the public eye: his extravagant personality, his ominous humor, his leading teams, his decorated career, his charity and his burning love for the Dodgers. In recent days, others have also discussed and learned another part of Lasorda’s story – his relationship with his son – and what it said at the time about society and baseball culture.
“My son was not gay,” Lasorda told Peter Richmond, who wrote about the complicated relationship for GQ magazine in 1992, in some public comments about his son.
“No way,” he continues, with a few expressions strewn in it. ‘No way. I read it in a paper. I also read in that newspaper that a lady also gave birth to a monkey. That is not the truth. ”
Lasorda also rated on reports that his son was an AIDS patient. He told Richmond: ‘I do not care what people … I know what my son died of. I know what he died of. The doctor issued a report on how he died. He died of pneumonia. ”
In a recent commentary for the Los Angeles Blade, Karen Ocamb, a former news editor of the publication, claims that Lasorda once admitted at a charity event that his son is gay and that he died of AIDS. Lasorda’s family did not respond to a request from The New York Times for comment.
Spheeris, 75, was pleased that more people were talking about Tommy Jr. speak, for the subject was more silent at that time. She said Tommy Jr. also does not want people to talk about his sexuality because he wants to protect his father’s wishes. She found it sad, but said that Tommy Jr. did not offend his father about it.
Spheeris, a director who has made films such as ‘Wayne’s World’ and ‘Suburbia’, told Tommy Jr. in Los Angeles in the 1980s. They met at a punk rock club.
“I remember very clearly the moment I first saw him: he was sitting alone on the bank edge and everyone was there like all punk and everyone was dressed in black, but he was wearing a white suit,” she said. “I know it sounds strange, but he had a glow around him.”
They quickly became friends and visited his apartment in West Hollywood or the nearby clubs. She calls him a sweet, gentle and loving person with an impeccable sense of style. She said one reason she was so attached to him was because her own brother, who was killed by a drunk driver in 1984, was gay, and that many of his friends died of AIDS complications because of the medical treatment. was not as advanced as now. .
Spheeris said Tommy Jr. and his father loved each other. Tommy Jr. would be excited to meet his dad for a meal or at Dodger Stadium, where he would sit in the dugout before the games.
“He told me he likes to go because he can flirt with the guys,” she said laughing. “But of course he could not tell his father.”
She later added: ‘I do not want to be angry with Tommy Lasorda Sr. I do not want to be angry at someone who has just passed away and at someone who loves everyone. What I’m going to be angry about is the culture that allows that kind of thinking. This is what I do not like. Could you imagine? It was such a struggle between them to try to balance the balance between Sr.s. legacy and career on course while having a gay boy in such an environment where people have no tolerance for gay people. ”
While his father was the manager of the Dodgers, Tommy Jr. befriended Glenn Burke, a field worker in the team, who hampered Burke’s relationship with his boss. Burke is the first player in Major League Baseball history to reach out to his teammates during his playing career. He appeared in public in 1982.
Al Campanis, the then general manager of the Dodgers, offered Burke bonus money if he got married – something he later said was not a bribe, but because the Dodgers encouraged family stability and maturity in their roster. (Campanis was fired in 1987 for racist comments he made in a television interview about black people.) Burke, who was black, turned down the offer.
Burke was traded to the Oakland Athletics in May 1978, an unpopular move in the Dodgers clubhouse. Two of Burke’s teammates, Davey Lopes and Dusty Baker, later said Burke was traded because he was gay. In the 2010 documentary “Out: The Glenn Burke Story,” his former athletics teammate Claudell Washington said manager Billy Martin Burke introduced his new team with a homophobic slap.
Since then, a few more players, referees and officials have appeared. Most prominent: Billy Bean, who became MLB’s first ambassador of inclusion after his playing days. Yet over the past few years, like Kevin Pillar and Yunel Escobar, and broadcaster Thom Brennaman have had to apologize for using homophobic insults.
But the baseball culture has progressed since Lasorda’s days, said Dave Pallone, a former MLB referee, who was fired in 1988 for being gay. He appeared in public shortly thereafter and wrote a book entitled “Behind the Mask: My Double Life in Baseball.” He said attitudes in the sport are slowly starting to change as more people come out in public.
“Hopefully it helped to shift the tide and maybe baseball culture will get better,” Pallone said. And with the younger people playing in the game, and younger people in management, the game will change as far as openness to the LGBTQ community, and it will not be that difficult for fathers and mothers who are part of the game of baseball to accept their sons and daughters. ”
Pallone, 69, said this in a telephone interview Friday night, the day after Lasorda died of a sudden cardiopulmonary arrest. Pallone regards Lasorda as a friend and regrets his loss. He had fond memories of their time together during and after their field days; Lasorda once appeared on Pallone’s radio program and told him never to lose his referee.
However, Pallone said he never spoke to Lasorda about his 1990 outcome. He also never spoke to Lasorda about his son after Tommy Jr. ‘s death. Pallone, who Tommy Jr. seen earlier at games did not feel it was his place to discuss the topic.
“There was no doubt he had a hard time,” Pallone said of Lasorda. ‘But on the other side of the coin, Tommy was a very generous person outside the baseball field. We differed on the field, but he was also fair. He was generous from the field. If he could help you with something, he would do it. So you try to look at the whole picture, especially when I was a gay man. Although I knew in my heart what was going on, I also wanted to try, just like now, to look at the whole person. ‘
Pallone said that although Lasorda’s public comments about his son were terrible, he attributed Lasorda’s attitude to, among other things, a macho culture, a generation gap, a Catholic background “and that he was Italian, as my father was Italian.” He added: “It is difficult to accept a boy’s sexual orientation if it is not what you are used to.”
When Tommy Jr. died, Lasorda, his wife and their daughter were by his side, a family spokesman told The Los Angeles Times at the time. Lasorda was absent from the team for three days. He later told GQ that he cried a lot over the death of his son, but never about the team.
“I had him for 33 years,” Lasorda told the magazine. ‘Thirty-three years is better than nothing, is it? If I could see God, and God said to me, ‘I will give you a son for 33 years and take him away after 33 years,’ I would have said, ‘Give him to me.’ ‘
Pallone said he believes Lasorda led his grief in his charity work, which is often aimed at helping youth. In 1997, Lasorda and his wife donated $ 500,000 to Thomas Lasorda Jr. Memorial Foundation to maintain a public gymnasium in Yorba Linda, California, not far from where they lived. The facility was renamed the Thomas Lasorda Jr. Field House.
Pallone, who has become a motivational speaker offering presentations on diversity to businesses, schools and teams, said he raised Lasorda’s story in his conversations.
“The story is, you do not lock your family’s doors,” Pallone said. ‘You just can’ t close doors, period, because you never know how it’s going to hurt you. And that’s what happened to Tommy. ‘