Skip to content

Andy Davis

Andrew Marcus “Andy” Davis was a Black American disability-rights writer, advocate, and speaker from Pasadena, California. Born on October 8, 1977, he developed spastic diplegic cerebral palsy after neonatal Group B streptococcal meningitis and had several other disabilities that affected his mobility, communication, sensory access, sleep, and health. He spent much of his childhood in segregated special education despite having no intellectual disability. His writing and public work addressed presumed competence, educational segregation, medical racism, communication access, and Black disabled life.

Andy was quiet, observant, dryly funny, intellectually hungry, and intensely loyal. Speech and physical movement could require substantial effort, but neither reflected the speed or complexity of his thought. As a teenager, he listened to Fitzgerald, Orwell, Baldwin, Morrison, Hughes, Angelou, and disability and civil-rights history while his school assigned him beginning readers and towel-folding exercises. His parents eventually withdrew him from Pasadena High School when educational neglect and escalating stress began endangering his health. He later passed the California High School Proficiency Examination, earned two English degrees, and turned the history the school had tried to bury into ‘’Room 118’‘ and a decades-long career.

Early Life and Background

Andy was the son of registered nurse Sarah Davis and Pasadena police officer Marcus Davis. Sarah was still a teenager when Andy was born. Shortly after his birth, Group B streptococcal meningitis caused permanent neurological injury, including cerebral palsy, epilepsy, bilateral hearing loss, and cortical visual impairment. Doctors urged his young parents to place him in an institution; Sarah and Marcus refused and raised him at home.

His childhood included frequent medical appointments, therapies, equipment negotiations, and repeated fights for care. Sarah became his primary medical coordinator, first through lived knowledge and later with the clinical expertise of a registered nurse. Marcus worked long and overtime shifts to preserve the family’s financial stability and health coverage. Both challenged doctors and educators who treated Andy’s motor and speech disabilities as evidence of intellectual disability.

Andy’s hearing loss and cortical visual impairment were not adequately recognized or accommodated for years. Print was slow and exhausting to process, and spoken material sometimes needed to be repeated. His sleep apnea also remained undiagnosed into adulthood, leaving him profoundly tired even after long periods of sleep. The combination made conventional classroom access difficult, but the barriers were sensory, physical, and institutional rather than intellectual.

When Andy was about fourteen, the family moved into a house that his maternal grandfather, a construction worker with more than forty years of experience, helped adapt around Andy’s body. He installed load-bearing handholds throughout the rooms, disguising them as decorative trim, coat hooks, and strategically placed furniture. The modifications allowed Andy to steady himself while walking in familiar spaces without making the home resemble an institution.

Education

Segregated schooling

Andy spent eight years at Riverside School for Exceptional Children before entering Pasadena High School in 1994. At Pasadena High, he was placed primarily in a self-contained special-education classroom known as Room 118. He had limited access to general education and joined his nondisabled peers most consistently at lunch, where he sat with Cody Matsuda and their friend Max.

Room 118 assigned Andy beginning readers, kindergarten-level worksheets, towel folding, and other low-expectation “life skills” work. At home, he was listening to ‘’The Great Gatsby’‘, ‘‘1984’‘, Baldwin, Morrison, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, science writing, and civil-rights and disability-rights history. He paused and replayed recordings when his hearing loss made that necessary, often listening more than once and developing a detailed grasp of theme, symbolism, character, and historical context. His parents supplied library audiobooks, bought recordings when they could, and sometimes recorded books themselves.

Andy did not initially tell his parents the full extent of the school’s bullying and neglect. Sarah and Marcus had fought hard to place him outside a segregated special school, and he feared that admitting Pasadena High was failing him would make their work feel wasted or give the district another reason to remove him from general education entirely.

By fall 1995, school stress was producing direct medical consequences. Andy had four seizures in one week, with postictal exhaustion that lasted for days. After one seizure, school staff left him unconscious and sitting in his own urine for hours. Marcus filed a formal complaint. Andy later asked Sarah whether he could die from a seizure, including whether he was at risk from sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. Sarah and Marcus concluded that maintaining the appearance of integration was no longer worth the danger to his health and withdrew him from Pasadena High.

Matsuda-Davis Homeschool Cooperative

From fall 1995 through spring 1997, Andy and Cody Matsuda studied through the Matsuda-Davis Homeschool Cooperative. Lessons alternated between the Matsuda and Davis homes four days a week, with Fridays left flexible for field trips or work at either house. Ellen Matsuda taught history, social studies, and disability rights; Greg Matsuda taught mathematics and science; Sarah Davis taught English, literature, and creative writing; and Marcus Davis taught practical life skills, first aid, and emergency preparedness.

The cooperative built rest and access into the school day. Lessons started later in the morning, included a mandatory midday rest period, and could continue in the afternoon when the boys had the energy. Andy received audio recordings and extra writing time. He and Cody could work lying down, move quickly through subjects that held their attention, slow down when fatigue increased, and communicate through speech, typing, AAC, or ASL without being treated as less capable. Andy’s seizure activity decreased substantially once the daily school stress was removed.

The arrangement also showed his parents how much independent education he had already built through audiobooks. He was not merely soothed by the recordings Marcus brought home; he was analyzing them and building the literary foundation that formal schooling had denied him.

CHSPE and higher education

Andy passed the California High School Proficiency Examination in spring 1997, scoring in the eighty-fifth percentile overall and the ninety-second percentile in English. The testing center flagged his results for review because staff considered them unexpectedly high for his “background.” Sarah named the racism and ableism directly; Marcus later addressed the incident in public community meetings. For Andy, the scores brought vindication alongside grief and anger over the years segregated schooling had taken from him.

Andy attended Pasadena City College with Cody from fall 1997 through 2000. He then transferred to California State University, Northridge, whose disability services and proximity to home made a sustainable four-year pace possible. His senior thesis, “Presumed Incompetent: Segregation in American Special Education,” examined Room 118, medical racism, and audiobooks as access. He completed his BA in English with honors in 2004.

He returned to CSUN for an MA in English from 2006 through 2008, concentrating on American literature, disability studies, and critical race theory. He taught an English-composition section as a teaching assistant with support. His graduate work became part of the manuscript for ‘’Room 118’‘, published in 2008.

Career

Main article: Andy Davis (Career and Legacy)

Andy became a disability-rights writer, advocate, and speaker. His published work included ‘’Room 118’‘, ‘’Invisible Until Inconvenient: Black Youth in Medical Contexts’‘, and the 2033 collection ‘’The Cost of Being Misread: Essays on Black Disabled Life’‘. He later collaborated with Logan Weston on the ‘’Two Generations, One Fight’’ presentation series, the CP Pain Protocol, medical-journal publications, and books that brought disability-justice analysis into clinical education.

His work also included ‘’Twenty Years Later: Has Room 118 Changed?’‘, the anthology ‘’Pain, Presumption, and Power’‘, and ‘’Dear Dr. Weston’‘. Andy brought historical analysis and lived expertise to clinical work that connected patient testimony with medical research. He also mentored younger disabled writers and advocates, including people who had grown up reading his work.

Personality

Andy conserved language and energy. He was often quiet in unfamiliar settings, watching and processing before deciding what he wanted to contribute. His reserve came from several overlapping realities: speech cost physical effort, autism shaped his processing and social energy, pain and fatigue limited what he could spend, and years of being misread taught him to assess whether a room was safe. With people he trusted, he was emotionally expressive, affectionate, and capable of dry humor and terrible puns.

He noticed details other people missed and chose his words carefully. He did not form close bonds quickly, but his loyalty ran deep once he did. Cody became the person with whom Andy did not have to perform energy, speech, or normalcy. Max was a patient friend during their school years, helping Andy through the immediate panic and vomiting that followed news of Cody’s 1995 suicide attempt without turning the help into spectacle.

His anger at Room 118 and medical dismissal remained sharp. Age did not make him diplomatic about systems that warehoused disabled children or required Black disabled people to prove their humanity. It did, however, reduce his need to personally persuade every skeptic. As his work and reputation grew, he could let a book, a lecture, or a refusal stand without exhausting himself in an argument no one had entered honestly.

Alongside that anger, Andy had a strong capacity for ordinary pleasure. A familiar meal, a lavender-scented room, a terrible joke that made Cody laugh, parallel quiet with someone he loved, or an afternoon when both men could be tired without apology mattered as much to him in middle age as public recognition did. His later role as a mentor combined an elder’s perspective with an insistence that younger disabled people should not have to survive the same barriers in order to be taken seriously.

Cultural Identity and Heritage

Andy understood his Blackness, disability, sexuality, and autism as inseparable parts of one life. Educational and medical institutions did not encounter those identities one at a time: the assumptions attached to his Black body intensified the ableist reading of his wheelchair and speech, while disability and racism both shaped how readily professionals dismissed his pain and intelligence.

His family used both the language of home and the institutional language necessary for survival. Sarah could move between maternal intimacy and exact nursing terminology; Marcus moved between a police officer’s controlled authority and relaxed AAVE with his family. Andy likewise used speech, writing, AAC, audiobooks, and ASL without ranking one form of language or literacy above another. His public work refused pressure to discuss racism, disability, or queer life as separate subjects for separate audiences.

Andy’s marriage to Cody, a mixed-race Japanese American and white disabled man, developed in a culture that routinely treated disabled people as asexual and denied queer disabled people ordinary romantic adulthood. The Davises and Matsudas accepted the relationship. Andy and Cody did not present their life together as proof that disability had been overcome; they treated disability, access, interdependence, love, exhaustion, and care as ordinary components of the same partnership.

Speech and Communication Patterns

Andy had a lifelong stutter, slower speech, and articulation differences associated with cerebral palsy and mild bilateral hearing loss. His speech could include a mild lisp, repeated initial sounds, and omitted or altered sounds. Stress, pain, strong emotion, exhaustion, and seizure recovery could make speech substantially harder. People needed to wait rather than finish his sentences or treat his pace as evidence that he did not understand.

At times, exhaustion made spoken language unavailable. Andy then used nods, gestures, writing, typing, AAC, or ASL. “M-mama?” could function as a check-in, a request for comfort, or a call for help when a longer sentence cost more than he could manage. Reading aloud and singing softly could reduce his stutter, as could relaxed conversation with Cody, though neither erased the stutter as part of his voice.

Andy learned ASL after Cody became nonspeaking in 1995. He learned alongside Cody’s family and continued developing a private shorthand with Cody across their relationship. They combined ASL, AAC, speech, typing, vocalizations, touch, facial expression, and silence. Andy knew variations in Cody’s sounds and signing; Cody learned the differences among Andy’s conversational stutter, exhaustion, pain, anxiety, and pre-seizure changes.

Speech-to-text and improving word-processing access in the late 1990s and 2000s gave Andy a more sustainable route from thought to prose. The early software required extensive training, correction, and editing because it did not reliably recognize his speech, but it still expanded what he could draft without depending on handwriting. Audiobooks and text-to-speech remained central to how he read and researched.

Health and Disabilities

Andy had spastic diplegic cerebral palsy, epilepsy, autism, sleep apnea, gastroparesis, hearing loss, cortical visual impairment, chronic pain, and speech differences.

Cerebral palsy, pain, and mobility

Spasticity affected Andy’s legs most strongly, while cerebral palsy also affected his speech, articulation, transfers, and fine and gross motor control. Stress, anxiety, physical exhaustion, emotional distress, cold, illness, prolonged positioning, overexertion, and seizure activity could intensify muscle tension and spasms. Severe episodes could lock his legs, pull his body into painful involuntary postures, prevent him from bearing weight, and require hours of support and recovery.

Warmth helped his muscles. During severe spasm episodes, his established home routine could include prescribed baclofen, a warm bath with Epsom salts and lavender, careful positioning, stretching, and extended rest. The Davis family understood the baths as part of what helped him; their value lay in warmth, routine, and Andy’s experienced comfort rather than a claim that magnesium was absorbed through his skin. Afterward, his muscles could remain sore and he could sleep for much of the following day.

Andy used a wheelchair from elementary school onward, despite early school resistance to the equipment. During adolescence and early adulthood, he used a manual chair at school and in the community, walked short distances along the handholds in the Davis home, and could make some independent transfers when he was not in crisis. Walking and transfers still required planning and energy. By 2033, he used a power wheelchair full-time. Marissa and other support staff assisted with transfers, spasm management, seizure protocols, and daily care so that Cody did not become Andy’s sole caregiver.

Epilepsy

Andy’s epilepsy included stress-sensitive breakthrough seizures, postictal confusion and profound fatigue, and risks of injury and aspiration. Tonic-clonic seizures occurred during the 1995 school and Cody crises. Public seizures also brought the indignity of strangers treating a medical crisis as spectacle.

His tonic-clonic seizures involved loss of consciousness, full-body rigidity, and then convulsive jerking, generally lasting one to three minutes. Confusion and exhaustion afterward could give way to hours of sleep. Status epilepticus was another risk of his epilepsy, not the usual course of those shorter events.

Tonic-clonic seizures were Andy’s predominant presentation, but he also had focal seizures. The focal events were usually briefer, lasting seconds to about a minute. His awareness varied: he remained aware through some events and lost awareness during others. He took Tegretol (carbamazepine) daily. The medication added drowsiness, dizziness, and difficulty with coordination to his existing physical and energy demands, and it did not eliminate breakthrough seizures during periods of high stress.

The four-seizure week in fall 1995 helped force his withdrawal from Pasadena High. News of Cody’s suicide attempt earlier that year triggered panic, vomiting, spasms, and multiple seizures. Andy understood the danger of his epilepsy and asked Sarah directly whether he could die from a seizure, including whether sudden unexpected death in epilepsy could happen to him.

Sleep apnea, gastroparesis, and sensory access

Severe obstructive sleep apnea went unrecognized until 2002 or 2003 despite Sarah’s repeated reports of snoring, breathing pauses, gasping, and exhaustion. Andy made a soft snoring or stertorous sound even while awake, and the sound became more pronounced during sleep. Before treatment, long hours in bed did not produce restorative sleep, compounding pain, seizures, spasticity, concentration difficulty, and the sedating effects of medication.

Gastroparesis caused early fullness, nausea, bloating, abdominal discomfort, and occasional vomiting. Andy usually ate small, frequent meals slowly and sometimes relied more on liquids when solids were difficult. Stress could worsen the symptoms. His hearing loss and cortical visual impairment made print and rapid uncaptioned speech tiring to access; audiobooks, repetition, audio recordings, and other alternative formats were practical access rather than lesser versions of reading.

1997 baclofen crisis and medical trauma

Andy’s health deteriorated during summer 1997, with escalating seizures, spasticity, pain, and exhaustion. Later that year, an increase in his daily baclofen from 80 to 100 milligrams caused prolonged sedation, severely slurred speech, persistent vomiting, dehydration, hematemesis, and concern about respiratory depression. Testing found a baclofen level of 1,200 nanograms per milliliter against a therapeutic range of 80–400. Andy told Sarah that he felt “gone” and was terrified the state would not end.

At the emergency department, Sarah identified the reaction and requested urgent evaluation, but staff treated her as an anxious mother despite her nursing credentials and Andy’s respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms. The family waited while his condition worsened. Sarah called Ellen, then a white state disability-rights official; after Ellen arrived with her state identification and repeated the same concerns, staff moved Andy into an examination room. He required intensive care for three to four days.

Relationship to His Body

Andy had a long habit of trying to protect other people from the cost of his needs. As a teenager, he concealed school mistreatment from his parents, apologized when spasms interrupted time with Cody, and hesitated to request comfort or assistance for fear of being burdensome. His adult self-advocacy grew partly from learning that rest, mobility aids, communication tools, and comfort were not admissions of failure. He became direct about access requirements while retaining the careful, selective quality of his speech.

Lavender was Andy’s defining comfort scent. Sarah used lavender Epsom salts during warm baths for spasms, and a lavender diffuser ran in his room. As a teenager, Andy hesitated to ask for something he had coded as “girly” even though it helped; learning to request it without apology became one small part of learning that useful comfort did not need to satisfy someone else’s idea of masculinity.

The 1997 baclofen crisis deepened Andy’s fear of medical settings and his family’s distrust of clinicians who did not listen. Repeated racialized dismissal of his pain, seizures, sensory disabilities, and sleep symptoms left him hypervigilant and sometimes reluctant to seek emergency treatment. His later advocacy and work with Logan treated that medical trauma as relevant clinical information rather than patient noncompliance.

Adjusting to CPAP was difficult because the mask felt uncomfortable and claustrophobic, but treatment gave Andy restorative sleep for the first time. The diagnosis produced relief and improved energy alongside anger and grief over how long clinicians had dismissed the symptoms as simply part of cerebral palsy.

In private life, Andy’s philosophy became an acceptance of disabled time and interdependence. Rest was valid. Asking for help, warmth, food, a different communication method, or an altered plan was self-knowledge rather than weakness. Love did not require either partner to hide pain or perform independence. Andy and Cody’s promise to be tired together became a practical ethic they carried into marriage.

Physical Appearance and Presentation

Andy was nearly six feet tall, with a tall, lean frame. In adolescence, his build was especially gangly, all height before he had fully filled out. His height increased the practical complexity of transfers when spasms or postictal exhaustion prevented him from assisting. He moved carefully and deliberately, using his chair, fixed supports, or another person’s help according to what his body could do that day. By 2033, his hair had begun greying at the temples.

His stutter and soft stertor made his body audible as well as visible. His hands could tremble when he was exhausted or stressed. Severe fatigue and pain showed in his face, and gastroparesis could leave him visibly nauseated or struggling to finish food.

Andy inherited Marcus’s height, strong jaw and bone structure, deep brown eyes, deep brown skin tone, and expressive eyebrows. Their physical resemblance accompanied a shared tendency to become quiet while processing emotion; Marcus’s heavier, sturdy build differed from Andy’s lean frame.

Andy preferred soft, comfortable clothing that did not aggravate sensory sensitivities and allowed room for movement, positioning, and transfers. He often layered clothing because warmth reduced muscle tension. He used a medical-alert bracelet identifying his epilepsy and could wear protective headgear when seizure risk made it appropriate. Lavender from the diffuser in his room clung faintly to his clothes and blankets.

Tastes, Habits, and Daily Life

His fail-safe comfort meal was a Big Mac, large fries, and a chocolate shake. Marcus often brought it home without turning the gesture into a conversation. The food was familiar and pleasurable, and the shake sometimes provided calories when solid food was difficult. Andy’s usual eating pattern remained small, slow, frequent meals chosen around what his stomach could tolerate.

Books were both intellectual work and comfort. Fitzgerald, Orwell, Baldwin, Morrison, Hughes, and Angelou were among the writers who shaped him before the school system acknowledged that he could read at all. He preferred quiet environments because noise and overlapping conversation increased sensory load and drained energy he needed for speech and physical regulation.

Predictable routines helped Andy manage autism, medication, meals, sleep, pain, and energy. He checked that the diffuser was running, kept meals and medication on a reliable schedule, used CPAP at night, and built recovery time into plans. He and Cody developed daily body check-ins rather than assuming yesterday’s capacity would carry forward. Parallel activity—reading, writing, or resting in the same room without demanding conversation—was a normal form of intimacy.

Tommy, a yellow Labrador retriever, was a constant companion during Andy’s youth. He lay beside Andy through spasm episodes, whined when Andy was in distress, and stayed close while he slept. Tommy was not a trained service dog; his usefulness came from attachment and natural responsiveness rather than certification.

Personal Philosophy

Andy’s central principle was presumed competence: a communication barrier was not a cognitive barrier, and an unfamiliar method of reading or speaking was not an inferior one. Audiobooks were reading. AAC and ASL were communication. Taking longer to answer did not diminish the answer. A student’s need for access called for accommodation and meaningful curriculum, not lowered expectations.

He understood educational segregation as a system that created the failures it claimed merely to measure. Room 118 denied real instruction, then used the resulting lack of opportunity as proof that its students could not learn. He also argued that medical racism and ableism compounded one another: Black disabled people were more likely to have pain dismissed, symptoms minimized, intelligence underestimated, and care delayed.

Technology mattered to Andy because it changed who could participate in education, work, relationships, and public life. He did not treat a device as liberation by itself; people still had to believe that the person using it had something worth saying. His own work joined access technology with the political demand to listen.

Family and Core Relationships

Sarah Davis

Main article: Sarah Davis and Andy Davis

Sarah combined nursing knowledge with an intimate understanding of Andy’s baseline, pain, seizure warnings, speech, and spasticity. Andy called for “Mama” when frightened or in severe pain because he trusted her to arrive, explain what was happening, and take his report seriously. She managed crises with clinical precision while refusing to make care impersonal.

Sarah fought the recommendation to institutionalize Andy, school segregation, failures to provide equipment and communication access, and clinicians who dismissed his symptoms. She also recognized his romantic feelings for Cody before Andy named them while awake. After hearing him speak lovingly about Cody in his sleep, she told him quietly, “I hope he loves you back too, baby. I really, really do.”

Marcus Davis

Main article: Marcus Davis and Andy Davis

Marcus showed love through practical action: steadying a wheelchair, helping with transfers, bringing McDonald’s, teaching emergency skills, and providing the financial stability that kept care available. His position as a Black police officer made him acutely aware that people wearing his uniform could misread or kill his disabled Black son. He taught Andy and Cody what to say and do during police encounters while also speaking publicly about that danger.

Marcus initially questioned whether Andy understood romantic love or was confusing friendship and gratitude. Sarah confronted the assumption, and Marcus recognized that he had underestimated his son in a new form. He became a warm supporter of Andy and Cody, teasing Andy about all-night phone calls and treating Cody as a second son.

After Andy’s CHSPE scores were flagged, Marcus used community meetings to challenge the expectation that a disabled Black student’s success had to be surprising. He lived to see Andy and Cody married and Andy established as a writer and advocate. Marcus died from a heart attack at age seventy-five in March 2033, shortly before Andy attended a disability-rights conference with Cody, Logan, and Charlie Rivera. When Logan asked about his grief, Andy remembered his father’s thirty-five-year police career and his willingness to support work he did not always immediately understand. He wished Marcus could have attended and met Logan and Charlie. Cody reminded him that Marcus had known their work mattered.

Maternal grandfather and Tommy

Andy’s maternal grandfather expressed care through the practical craft of making the Davis home usable. The disguised handholds he installed gave Andy meaningful mobility within familiar space and remained part of the house after Andy and Cody began living there together.

Tommy provided quiet physical companionship through pain and recovery. He stayed close during spasms and sleep, offering warmth and a predictable presence without asking Andy to speak or perform wellness.

Heather Moore

Andy met Cody’s aunt Heather in summer 1995. She was the first adult with cerebral palsy he had met and, like Andy, had epilepsy and used a wheelchair. Heather asked about his disabilities directly, waited through his stutter, and told him, “It sucks sometimes, right? But we manage.” At a later breakfast, they compared morning spasms, pain, physical therapy, and the instinct to fight involuntary movement. Their speech patterns were different, but neither treated the other’s pace as a lack of understanding.

Romantic and Significant Relationships

Cody Matsuda

Main article: Andy Davis and Cody Matsuda

Andy and Cody first met in middle school, and Cody knew Sarah and Marcus well before the 1995 crisis. They became close at Pasadena High School in 1995 through shared exhaustion, disability, and medical dismissal. Their early friendship made room for cancelled plans, quiet lunches, and falling asleep while trying to play video games. Neither expected the other to perform energy he did not have.

When Cody attempted suicide in spring 1995, Andy learned about it at school and had a panic attack. He vomited repeatedly, experienced severe spasms and multiple seizures, and kept asking whether Cody would die. Marcus later drove him to County General’s intensive care unit. Cody had survived cardiac arrest and an anoxic brain injury but could no longer produce speech.

During the visit, Andy told him, “I n-never told you I und-derstood. That I g-get it. The b-being tired all the t-time. The d-doctors not believing you. I g-get it, C-Cody. I d-do.” The emotion triggered a full-body spasm, and Marcus steadied Andy’s chair while he continued. Andy promised Cody, “We’ll j-just be tired t-together, okay? We’ll fall asl-leep playing video g-games. We’ll c-cancel when we n-need to. We’ll j-just ‘’be’‘. N-no pressure. N-nothing hard. J-just us.”

Andy learned ASL with Cody and his family. Over the following months, he and Cody spent hours on the telephone, sometimes communicating only through speech, vocalizations, breath, and presence. During a history call, Andy mixed up Christmas and Thanksgiving and said George Washington crossed the Delaware on Jesus’s birthday. Cody laughed fully for the first time since his injury. Andy promised to make him laugh that way again, then said “I love you” without ceremony. Cody returned it through AAC, and they went back to their homework.

They sometimes fell asleep without hanging up. After one eleven- or twelve-hour call, Sarah and Ellen found both boys asleep with the connection still open and called each other, delighted. Marcus’s teasing prompted Andy and Cody to ask one another directly whether they were boyfriends. They became a couple in summer 1995.

Their first kiss came during one of Andy’s spasm episodes. Andy was apologizing for his body and insisting that he had ruined the time together. Cody stopped the apology by kissing him, then signed that Andy’s body was not something he needed to apologize for. It was a first kiss for both of them.

Cody moved into the Davis home in summer 1997 while Andy’s seizures, pain, spasticity, and untreated sleep apnea were particularly severe. Andy’s childhood bedroom became their shared room: lavender diffuser, Cody’s AAC charging station, two wheelchairs, and books everywhere. They attended Pasadena City College together, became engaged circa 2002–2003, moved into an accessible apartment circa 2005–2006, and married in 2013 when California again permitted same-sex marriage.

By 2033, both men used power wheelchairs and worked with support staff. Their care teams protected the marriage from becoming an arrangement in which either partner had to function as the other’s only caregiver. Their public advocacy sometimes overlapped, but their private relationship remained built around check-ins, multiple forms of communication, shared rest, humor, books, and the freedom to be ill without apologizing.

Memorable Quotes

“I n-never told you I und-derstood. That I g-get it. The b-being tired all the t-time. The d-doctors not believing you. I g-get it, C-Cody. I d-do.” (To Cody during their 1995 hospital visit.)

“We’ll j-just be tired t-together, okay? We’ll fall asl-leep playing video g-games. We’ll c-cancel when we n-need to. We’ll j-just ‘’be’‘. N-no pressure. N-nothing hard. J-just us.” (To Cody during the same visit.)

“Love you… Love you s’much. Don’t leave, okay? Just… stay.” (Speaking about Cody in his sleep after the hospital visit.)

“I was always here. Always intelligent. Always learning. You just didn’t see me.”

(A signature phrase in his advocacy work that became foundational to disability-rights discussions of presumed competence.)

“Communication barriers are not cognitive barriers.”

(A core principle of his writing and advocacy, challenging the conflation of speech and intellectual disabilities.)

“The kid folding towels while his mind analyzed Orwell grew up. Got the tools he needed. Found his voice.”

(From his later advocacy work, describing Room 118 and the communication and educational access that made his work possible.)

Characters Supporting Characters Living Characters Authors Disabled Characters Chronic Illness Characters Wheelchair Users Mobility Disabilities Neurodivergent Characters Autistic Characters ASL Users LGBTQ+ Characters Black Characters Black American Characters Matsuda Family