When Troy Cox, right, decided he would fight the anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination he experienced from his employer, his husband Jeff Gorcyznski stood by him through the fight
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
“We love you,” Troy Cox’s employer told him. But when it came to his identity as a gay man, the employer added, “We don’t love that part of you.”
That half-assed compliment slowly escalated into a discrimination complaint.
For about a year, Cox has worked at the front desk of administration at Houston-based Nexus Children’s Hospital on Greenville Avenue in Dallas. He said he took the job so that he could continue his recovery from alcoholism.
His previous job was as a flight attendant with Southwest Airlines, and overnights out of town were always an excuse to drink. But he had given up drinking, was doing well with his recovery and was happy in his new position.
One of the things he took over as the person at the front desk was decorating for all of the holidays. He said he wanted to make the front desk look less institutional and happier and more colorful for the children.
“They loved it and asked me to keep doing it,” Cox said about his co-workers and employers who added him to the employee engagement committee. He said he never had to ask permission to decorate and regularly got comments like, “I like walking through here in the morning,” and “makes it more like home.”
So he decorated the entrance for fall and then for Thanksgiving and, of course, for Christmas. He noted there were no complaints that he left out Eid or Chanukah. Then there were decorations for winter and spring and Easter.
The Easter decorations, he noted, included rainbow Peeps that everyone loved.
Then came summer and colorful Pride Month.
Uh-oh. Wait.
Pride Month?
Yes, he put up decorations that included the same rainbow-colored Peeps that hadn’t been a problem at Easter, and he added rainbow streamers. There were no signs that said “Happy Pride.” No LGBTQ+ mentions. No flags.
Just paper. With colors. Colors like red and orange and yellow. Like green and blue and purple.
You know — colored paper.
while to catch up
That encouraged some other staff members to decorate their private offices with rainbow colors as well.
The colors went up over the weekend. Then, Cox said, he was off Monday and Tuesday. And when he returned on Wednesday, all the decorations were gone.
“I was in shock,” he said. “I felt terrible about it.
“Doing the decorating was part of my recovery,” Cox explained.
Cox’s husband, Jeff Gorcyznski, said when Cox got home that night, he could tell something was wrong. “I saw them knock the wind out of that sail,” Gorcyznski said.
And it was clear to everyone at the hospital who knew Cox that something was wrong.
Six days later, he was told the decorations were political, but, the management admitted, they had gone about removing them the wrong way.
Political? He decorated with colored streamers. One decoration that was gone was a yellow sun drawn by a child at the hospital. Cox said he still doesn’t know where that picture went.
And the CEO who took down the decorations didn’t stop at the reception desk; she went into private offices and removed decorations.
“During the recovery process, I found out who I was,” Cox said. “During addiction I had lost myself. I couldn’t not say anything.”
The decision hit especially hard, happening as it did this year after the governor ordered decorative crosswalks removed from neighborhoods, Gorcyznski said. To support his husband, he wrote a song that started out to be about removing crosswalks but was really about trying to erase who we are.
After a written complaint to HR, Cox received a five-page memorandum and was told his stuff was in a box. “After all this, they wanted me to decorate for the 4th of July,” Cox said. He turned down the offer, and the CEO came in and did it herself.
Cox said he’s gotten so much support from coworkers and friends. People have come to work wearing rainbow socks. Rainbow bouquets of flowers were delivered to the hospital.
Employees brought in rainbow cookies and cupcakes.
Gorcyznski said his husband received an apology for the way the situation was handled, not for removing the decorations. But there are a lot more employees and patients at the hospital who deserve an apology, because a lot of LGBTQ+ people work there, and LGBTQ+ parents bring their children there for treatment.
Houston we have a problem
Over the summer, Cox continued to pursue the issue and filed a signed complaint, Gorcyznski said, adding Cox’s “persistence led to a more detailed HR review.”
Cox was told that certain issues had been identified that could have been handled better, and, he learned, corporate headquarters in Houston had even celebrated Pride. In addition, “the entire Dallas hospital site will undertake diversity training, including specific education around LGBTQ+ issues,” the corporate office declared.
Cox put it very simply: “Pride didn’t create the problem. Pride exposed the problem.”
Gorcyznski said he was most proud of his husband’s quiet persistence. “He could have decided that speaking up was too uncomfortable,” Gorcyznski said. “Instead, he put his name on the complaint because he did not want the next LGBTQ+ employee to inherit the same problem.”
Quiet persistence
Quiet persistence has been part of their relationship all along. In 2008, the couple flew to Massachusetts to get legally married, but then they had to wait seven years before Texas recognized their marriage.
But, Gorcyznski stressed, “Our marriage didn’t become real in 2015; Texas finally caught up with a marriage that had already been real for seven years.”
But while they knew they were married, Cox was denied bereavement time off when Gorcyznski’s mother passed away, because their marriage wasn’t recognized.
Now Cox is dealing with his sobriety.
“Recovery taught me to stop hiding,” he said. “Then I came to work, and, suddenly, the parts of me I had finally learned not to hide were the parts creating a problem.”
Gorcyznski quoted a line from his song about the rainbow crosswalks: “The rainbow sidewalk wasn’t the story. The story was what happens inside somebody when something that said ‘You belong here’ disappears overnight.”