When Penelope Spheeris heard that Tommy Lasorda passed away on Friday at 93, she knew many people would be touched by the sad news, particularly in Los Angeles.
The city has long been her home and it is also where Lasorda became a baseball icon, leading the Dodgers to two World Series titles during his Hall of Fame career.
But Spheeris’s mind quickly turned to someone else in the Lasorda family that she had known and missed: his son, Tommy Jr., known as Spunky, who was gay and died in 1991 at 33 from complications from AIDS.
She cried. “I always felt that it should be more public that Sr. had a son that was gay and gorgeous and everything that Tommy was,” she said in a phone interview on Saturday.