The Hudson Valley LGBTQ+ Community Center has done important and meaningful work for our community over the years. Founded in 2005 in the wake of New Paltz Mayor Jason West’s conducting of same-sex marriages, the center, a place where queer people are seen, supported and celebrated, was also a bold pioneer for its time. It’s really something to be proud of. It’s just that your Editorial Team would love to see it run, how shall we put this, less chaotically.

One of the more hazardous jobs in Uptown Kingston seems to be that of the center’s executive director. The latest one, Richard Heyl de Ortiz, was dismissed earlier this month under circumstances we’ll generously call “cloudy.” In brief – for more read our coverage here – Heyl de Ortiz, hired back in 2023, got fired on Sept. 2 in a way that he said didn’t conform at all to the center’s by-laws and on grounds that at first weren’t specified publicly by the center board of directors. Faced with an enormous outpouring of WTF! from the community and a closed-door meeting at the center we’re told was very shouty, the board then said Heyl de Ortiz was let go due to “complaints” from center staff. What the complaints were about, the board didn’t say. It’s since declined any request for more information. Heyl de Ortiz is having a meeting tonight (Tuesday, Sept. 22) at Old Dutch Church to further detail his perspective on what happened to him and why. This one is open to the public.

Let’s take a look back at Heyl de Ortiz’s predecessors in the center’s executive director post. It wasn’t a controversial job until 2021, when staffers accused ex-director Jeff Rindler-Jordan, who’d stepped down from the post the year before to care for his elderly mother, of racism and anti-transism. Rindler denied the accusations, calling them a product of “cancel culture.” One staffer filed a formal complaint with the state Division of Human Rights, but that complaint was dismissed. This came after a 2020 incident where the then-board president made the unfortunate mistake of putting the words “all,” “lives” and “matter” in a public speech at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. As the offending phrase was used derisively by opponents of the BLM movement to minimize their cause, an uproar arose immediately. The man who uttered the unutterable said he didn’t mean it in that way, but the pressure for him to resign was too much for him to resist. It was also around this time that the Newburgh LGBTQ center Zoom-bombed a meeting of the Kingston center, saying they did so to, Hudson Valley One reported in 2021, force the people in Kingston to “confront and dismantle its own privileging of perspectives which are overwhelmingly white, moneyed, cisgender and able-bodied.”

The two incidents gave the center cause to rethink what it was doing; some things the Newburgh center pointed out, like a lack of access at the site for disabled people and the center not putting out materials in Spanish, were remedied. The next director, hired in January 2021, was Peter Criswell, now the chair of the county legislature. In contrast to both his predecessor and successor directors, Criswell departed peacefully and, he said, of his own free will, in 2023. “Peter’s decision supports the center’s goal of creating more space and opportunity for diverse leadership.” At the time, center leadership praised him for stabilizing the center, upgrading the center’s programs and events and leading the center “through a deeply reflective period and a journey of accountability.” Later in 2023, Heyl de Ortiz, former director of New Paltz’s Historic Huguenot Street nonprofit, was given the job.

At this juncture, we’re not ready to say who’s right or wrong in Heyl de Ortiz’s dismissal. Usually, the nitty-gritty ends up in court papers, provided somebody actually files suit. Whenever we encounter a “they said/they said” situation like this, we think of the ultra-classic Akira Kurosawa film “Rashomon,” which shows how perspective is everything and that different people observing the same set of events can come away with completely different points of view about what happened.

That said, we can’t help but notice a pattern here. From our point of view, it seems an organization with serious and important work to do is primarily occupied with skulduggery and infighting. We’ve noted before that Kingston is one of the dwindling number of places in this country still dedicated to the ethos and ideals of so-called “woke” culture. Is it only us who see the irony of every county legislature meeting beginning with an acknowledgement that some of our ancestors were complete bastards who murdered and stole the land from those who were here first, but lacks any mention of maybe someday giving some of Kingston and Ulster County back to living indigenous people? We also can’t help noticing that despite the center’s leadership swearing up and down that it’s prioritizing diversity, Rindler-Jordan, Criswell and Heyl de Ortiz are all white cis males.

Another facet of the story is who’s actually paying for the center to operate. Last week, we all learned that – surprise! – the center runs largely on money from the NoVo Foundation. According to statistics from the philanthropy.org website, from 2021-25, NoVo gave the center $1.5 million. The next 10 donors on the website’s list combined gave approximately $252,500 – a sixth of what NoVo gave. We wonder if this pretty big imbalance has taken away the hustle of the center’s fundraising efforts. We’re sure that a more diverse base of contributors means the center board is held accountable by many. The situation now means they only have to keep one person happy – not a good situation for a socially oriented nonprofit.

The center leadership has its work cut out for it. Heyl de Ortiz has stated he wants his job back. We don’t see that in the cards, but one needn’t be a psychic to know whoever the next director is, they will face a massive challenge in getting the center out of the news and back to its core mission. We wish them luck.