REMEMBRANCE
Dean Wrzeszcz, GCN Ex-Copy Editor, Dies of COVID
Erie, Pennsylvania native, 62, was writer, actor, singer, New Yorker since 1978
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
Dean P. Wrzeszcz, a
writer, actor, and singer
whose work life included
several years as
a copy editor at Gay City News —
where he was also a story contributor
— died on April 3 after more
than a week of suffering symptoms
of COVID-19.
Born October 11, 1957 in Erie,
Pennsylvania, Dean, 62, was the
son of the late Aloysius Wrzeszcz
and Irene Wawrzyniak Wrzeszcz
and was raised in Erie with his
younger siblings, Victoria and
Richard.
A high school honor student in
English who played saxophone and
clarinet, Dean went on to study
voice, ballet, tap, and jazz dancing
at Erie’s Mercyhurst University. In
the Erie theater scene, Dean acted
in “Fiddler On The Roof” and “A
Streetcar Named Desire,” among
other productions. From there, he
took a job as stage manager with
the Ohio Kenley Players summer
stock company in Warren, where
he worked with famed actors that
included Henry Winkler, Harvey
Korman, and Carol Lawrence.
But from the time of his high
school senior trip to New York, it
was clear that’s where he would
end up. With high expectations,
Dean, like so many gay men in
those years and since, moved to
the city in 1978, where he won a
number of roles in Off-Broadway
productions and on television.
But Budd Isaacson, who dated
Dean for about a year after Dean’s
arrival in New York and enjoyed a
42-year friendship with him, recalls
that more than auditioning,
he was focused on learning the
craft of acting. He studied fi rst
with actor William Hickey at the
HB Studio in the West Village and
later at the William Esper Studio
on West 37th Street.
Dean’s insistence on learning
the art of acting speaks to a perfectionism
that imbued all his endeavors.
Decades later, in 2012, Dean
played the bishop in a New York
Dean Wrzeszcz, 1957-2020, in the last photo that his longtime friend Budd Isaacson took of him.
City staged reading of playwright
Tony Adams’ “A Letter from the
Bishop,” an intriguing drama
about homophobia and closetedness
in the Catholic Church.
“I was amazed at the way Dean
played the part of the bishop,” Adams
recalled this week. “I say ‘play’
rather than just ‘read’ because
he had the part memorized even
though the event was a reading,
not a performance. The theater
was packed but you could have
heard a pin drop during Dean’s
scene. The dismissive acerbic
blessing he brandished at the end
of that scene elicited a huge laugh
and applause. That comic fl ourish
would not have worked had he not
been so successful in fi nding and
delivering the full personality of
the homophobic bishop. He made
the play work.”
Dean’s pursuit of acting in his
earliest years in New York, however,
BUDD ISAACSON
was “derailed” according to
Isaacson by a doctor in the early
1980s telling him, “You probably
have pre-AIDS and maybe six
months to live.”
“His self-confi dence as an actor
went away,” Isaacson recalled, and
Dean soon moved to San Francisco,
which he thought made for “a
better place to die.”
Dean didn’t die in San Francisco;
instead he found employment
at a law fi rm in document
services, where his skills at writing
caught the attention of attorneys
who came to rely on him to
wordsmith their work. When he returned
to New York in the late ‘80s,
Dean continued his work in legal
document support for more than
15 years, again as a staff member
valued by senior attorneys, according
to Isaacson.
After leaving his fi nal law fi rm
employer in 2005, Dean turned his
attention to writing, taking classes,
participating in peer writing
groups, and publishing in a wide
array of venues.
For The Philadelphia Inquirer, he
wrote about his happy discovery of
heirloom tomatoes on a return visit
to his sister Vicky’s home in Erie.
In addition to eagle-eye copy
editing for Gay City News, Dean
wrote on a wide variety of topics.
Embedded in a grueling, weeklong
gay men’s fi tness boot camp, he
wrote “Boot Licked.”
A review of Michael Musto’s “Fork
on the Left, Knife in the Back”
prompted the Village Voice veteran
to brag, “Gay City News Gives Me A
Huge Thumbs Up.”
And Dean’s fi nal contribution to
Gay City News, in 2018, “Out For
the Holidays,” described his coming
out to his father in the 1980s
against the persistent pleadings of
his mother and sister.
In all of Dean’s writing, he combined
a concise, economical style
with keenly observed details —
and, at times, a wicked satirical
tone —a skill that probably contributed
to his appeal as an actor
as well.
In 2016, Dean published “My
Dinner With Andy,” a memory
piece about an evening decades before
that he began with Liz Eden —
the transgender ex-partner of the
character Al Pacino portrayed so
memorably in “Dog Day Afternoon”
— before meeting and spending
time with fashion designer Halston,
Studio 54 co-owner Steve
Rubell, and the one and only Andy
Warhol.
When, in 2017, he appeared at
the Trumpet Fiction series that formerly
ran at the East Village’s KGB
Bar, Dean didn’t read the piece so
much as he acted it, taking on the
voices and mannerisms of each of
its legendary characters.
Dean was also a singer, and rewarded
this writer with a tape of
his take on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,”
John Lennon’s “Imagine,”
and the spine-tingling “Bad
Things,” the theme song from
➤ DEAN WRZESZCZ, continued on p.19
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