In our last story about the Hudson Valley LGBTQ+ Community Center’s abrupt termination of Executive Director Richard Heyl de Ortiz, we reported on the public meeting held last week at the Old Dutch Church and dove into a letter handed out to meeting attendees from the begrudged staff.

The day before this meeting, Kingston Wire interviewed three Community Center staff members. One asked not to be identified. The others were Director of Programs and Services Charlie Solidum and Program Coordinator Phoenix Laxton. They have each been at the Community Center for two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half years respectively. Each person said that their statements are on behalf of the staff as a “unified whole” and are not coming from or are a reflection of the center.

We first sat down with Solidum, who said that staff made “multiple attempts to speak to Richard; privately, in groups, with supervision. We tried multiple avenues and multiple times to address the intimidating behavior he was exhibiting that made it scary to work here.”

He then went on to say that he believes that staff were being “stifled and hindered from our ability to do our jobs” because of a “culture of fear that [Heyl de Ortiz] manifested here.”

As was stated in the letter, Solidum said that Heyl de Ortiz would yell, stomp around the office, hit a table, and one time raised his fist to another staff member.

Solidum said he was personally yelled at a couple of times. Most of the yelling, he said, was in reference to Heyl de Ortiz wanting him to work over 40 hours a week. “He put a lot of hours in here and expected people to have a similar relationship to work as he did,” he said.

He said that the stress of the job was so bad that within the first six months of working at the community center he checked himself into inpatient psychiatric care “because of burnout.”

Solidum mentioned another instance where Heyl de Ortiz couldn’t find the handle to the water spigot outside to water the plants and said he was “stomping about it,” saying he couldn’t find it and was “belligerently angry about not being able to find it.” When a staff member located it for him, he was still “inconsolably angry.”

We spoke to Heyl de Ortiz about this instance, and he responded that he did not “rage” or “get angry,” but instead described the situation as such: After taking on the task of watering the plants for an absent staff member, Heyl de Ortiz was attempting to locate the spigot, which he said was supposed to be kept in the “bucket with the hose,” but found it was missing.

Heyl de Ortiz then looked at the schedule to see who watered last and approached a staff member and informed her that he couldn’t find the spigot. She responded by saying she didn’t know where it was and said she hadn’t misplaced it. Meanwhile, he said, when he approached the staffer, she had her feet up on boxes “that I had asked them to put away” and was playing a game on her phone.

The situation then escalated. “I asked her to please go find the handle. They got up and walked forcefully out of their office and down the stairs,” Heyl de Ortiz said. After this, the staffer approached Heyl de Ortiz with the spigot, which he took to water the plants. Heyl de Ortiz informed the staff it was located, and it was at this point that he saw that the staffer “had already texted a belittling text about me to the group.”

Heyl de Ortiz confronted the staffer the following day in the presence, he said, of Solidum, saying that it was inappropriate that she sent a text “making fun of me,” but “not so much because it was me, the director, but because it was belittling and that I did not want anyone on our team to be bullied or humiliated in that way.”

The staffer, Heyl de Ortiz said, responded by apologizing and saying the text wasn’t meant to be seen by him.

More than the emotional nuances of this situation, Heyl de Ortiz said that he “can’t believe we have an organization with a million-dollar budget at a time when our community is under siege and we are talking about this.”

Laxton also spoke about his relationship with Heyl de Ortiz, and said that staff were “sold on a completely different person” during Heyl de Ortiz’s interview process. During the interviews, Laxton said he asked Heyl de Ortiz “how, as a white, cis, gay man, can you represent the entire community and support the community.” Laxton said that Heyl de Ortiz answered by saying that he would represent marginalized voices by putting theirs above his. Laxton said this promise was not kept.

Laxton said that Heyl de Ortiz “spent all of his time here reminding us that he has the most power,” and at every staff meeting, he would sit at the head of the table.

Laxton said he worked alone with Heyl de Ortiz for a period of time, and it was during this time that Laxton remembers a few instances of Heyl de Ortiz acting angrily toward him, including a time he “scorned him” for not finding a TV remote as quickly as Heyl de Ortiz would have liked, and another time when Heyl de Ortiz “screamed” at Laxton because he opened the center late.

This happened early into Heyl de Ortiz’s employment at the center, and Laxton said that as more people were hired, he was ignored and avoided more by Heyl de Ortiz.

Regarding Allegations Against the Board President

The anonymous staff member spoke to an email Friedman had sent to Heyl de Ortiz this past May that was “encouraging self-care.” The source said Heyl de Ortiz “was enraged” by this.

This lines up with when Heyl de Ortiz told Kingston Wire that he had initially lodged a grievance against Friedman, which he said was due in part to an email Friedman had sent him.

In response to this allegation, Heyl de Ortiz laid out a timeline of the not one but two emails that led to that grievance. He said that on May 18 Friedman sent an email to all board members and staff saying that they were experiencing mental health issues and gave suggestions for everyone to conduct self-care. The following day, Heyl de Ortiz said that he received another email sent solely to him with another board member copied on it that accused him of not using a staff member’s chosen name and that he was consistently misgendering individuals.

The first instance noted here references an event that took place earlier that month where a new staff member at the time, Johnathan Hornig, was introduced to attendees of the event. Heyl de Ortiz said that Johnathan asked to be referred to as Johnny, but wanted Johnathan to be written on his business cards. At the event he introduced him to people as Johnny.

Heyl de Ortiz said that Friedman said he had “harmed” Hornig by not using his chosen name, which refers to when a trans person takes a new name after their transition and now has a chosen name; the original moniker is then referred to as a “dead name.” Horning is not trans. Hornig, after not being able to discuss this with Heyl de Ortiz before the email to him was sent, approached him and said it was a “nonissue.”

“In the wake of this he had more questions about who he reports to, Kade or me,” Heyl de Ortiz said. He said that Friedman was overstepping their power as board president by directly emailing staff without discussing with Heyl de Ortiz first.

This person also mentioned that regarding the internal investigation into the claims staff made against Heyl de Ortiz, none of them saw results either.

Regarding the allegations of age-based discrimination Heyl de Ortiz made against Friedman, Laxton said it was “ridiculous,” and described Friedman as “supportive, friendly, a cheerleader.”

The anonymous source said there is “no evidence of Kade being discriminatory,” and Solidum said that he believed Heyl de Ortiz “felt a certain amount of power over Kade,” and that “a lot of his vitriol got directed at Kade.”

Solidum said Heyl de Ortiz never gendered Friedman correctly and also regularly misgendered other staff members.

To this allegation, Heyl de Ortiz said “I think my history of almost three years of working with the Community Center … speaks for itself. All of us as human beings occasionally misgender people. I don’t do it consistently or intentionally.”

“The misgendering was a huge thing,” Solidum said. “People make mistakes but if you’re at the helm of this kind of organization and you can’t speak to people the way they want to be spoken to, that’s a problem.”

Solidum also said that he believes there was some “generational tension going on” between Heyl de Ortiz and Friedman, and said that Heyl de Ortiz “spent a lot of time appealing to what the founders want but not taking stock of where we are now as a community.”

Finally, we asked each individual whether they’d want Heyl de Ortiz reinstated in his role as executive director.

“Absolutely not,” Solidum said. “Nobody wants that here. At this point the damage is irreparable between the current staff and Richard. If there was a chance for reconciliation, he blew it.”

For Heyl de Ortiz, reinstatement is still his primary goal.

“When logical individuals look at this situation there is something that just does not add up,” be said. “You don’t have a water spigot, alleged misgendering, calling someone by a diminutive, leading to this termination in such an unthoughtful way.”