By dress wedding
The world and our Bay Area anarchist community lost the feisty and wondrous Dean Tuckerman on May 30, 2024. Born in Philadelphia on March 28, 1952, his mother imparted to him that he should think highly of himself, despite his challenges with cerebral palsy, and not take shit from anyone. Dean moved to New York City in the early 1970’s to join the Yippie! (Youth International Party) at the infamous Bleecker Street household. He installed himself as the greeter, helping new comrades figure out how to help the cause or find their way around town. He was assigned to attaining permits for events, as his inimitable and persistent style left typical bureaucrats racing to find a way to get him out of their offices quickly. He helped organize many Yippie! marijuana smoke-ins on the White House lawn in Washington DC. According to his long-time friend Mitchell Halberstadt, Dean was one of most emotionally and spiritually strong people he ever knew.
Dean provided decades of legal support, as a contact and a paralegal, whether he himself was in or out of jail. This applied both to political cases and to marijuana cases. He attended numerous National Lawyers Guild national conferences and was likely a member.
When he first arrived on the West Coast in the early 80’s, Dean lived in a variety of SROs in the Tenderloin and the East Bay. After getting his own apartment near Ashby BART, Dean let numerous friends and comrades crash in his living room, some for months at a time. He was a fixture at the Long Haul and at every sort of anarchist and gay political action in the Bay Area.
Around 2012, he moved to Bellingham to be near his close friend, “movement” attorney Larry Hildes and his wife Karen. Karen died of a brain tumor in 2019, and Larry died a year or two later of congestive heart failure. That left Dean fairly isolated in WA state, living in a studio apartment in a high-rise for seniors and disabled people.
Dean came to the Bay Area last April for the Folsom Street Fair and the Anarchist Book Fair. Finding himself stumbling, he tried to get admitted to SF General Hospital but was turned away. After he fell and hurt himself, he was brought to UCSF in an ambulance and admitted with no real diagnosis and fairly comatose. After weeks of little improvement, the State of California shirked the costly medical expense by having him flown back to Seattle, where he remained in a hospital, away from his community and friends, until his death.
Presente Dean Tuckerman
What is Remembered Lives!