Andy Cray was an incredible man. This t-shirt celebrates two pillars of his life: fat kitties & justice. Continue his legacy and carry his heart on your sleeve with this awesome shirt. Proceeds from the sale go to the National Center for Transgender Equality.
For crew neck up to size 2XL click here:http://www.booster.com/fat-kitties-and-justice2
In the words of Kellan Baker:
On Thursday, August 28, the LGBT movement suffered a terrible loss with the passing of Andrew Cray.
Andy had been struggling with cancer since October 2013. But before
his diagnosis, and even during his treatment and the period of remission
that was all too brief, Andy was a pivotal figure in the struggle for
LGBT rights. Despite the too few years we had with him, he was a
champion of LGBT rights and justice who achieved more by the age of 28
than most of us can manage in an entire lifetime.
I first met Andy five years ago in DC, when, after a stint as a law
fellow at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, he joined me on the
staff of the National Coalition for LGBT Health to share the work he had
been doing in law school on transgender coverage under Medicaid. At
first, I was suspicious — would I get along with this Andy person?
Wouldn’t we have to fight for the position of the resident obsessive
about transgender health?
But as soon as he arrived, I fell hard for Andy. He was impossible
not to like — a charming, friendly guy who just happened to be brilliant
and to love nothing more than reading the full text of the Affordable
Care Act and researching the labyrinths of insurance and public
accommodations law.
Over the next several years, Andy and I developed the kind of
wonderful, wide-ranging relationship that’s only possible among us LGBT
movement types who have no work/life boundaries. As we worked together
at the Coalition and then at the Center for American Progress, we spent
hours on conference calls plotting the future of various LGBT health
projects, before taking a shopping break at H&M, or as Andy called
it, the Ham. We traveled together all around the country, preaching the
gospel of LGBT health and the Affordable Care Act from Maine to Texas to
his beloved home state of Wisconsin.
Within a few years of arriving in DC, Andy had played a central role
in efforts such as securing new nationwide LGBT nondiscrimination
protections as part of health reform, partnering with the White House
and the Department of Health and Human Services to create the Out2Enroll
initiative that connects LGBT people with their new coverage options
under the Affordable Care Act, assisting with the passage of the HOPE
Act to make organ donation and transplantation more accessible to people
with HIV, and helping draft new provisions addressing the needs of
LGBTQ youth for the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act.
One of the causes closest to Andy’s heart was the national struggle
to eliminate insurance plan exclusions that discriminate against
transgender people by denying them coverage for the health care services
they need for gender transition. In just the last two years, Andy led
or was a key participant in successful efforts to secure bulletins
prohibiting these exclusions from insurance commissioners in DC and nine
other states to date. Together with other recent victories such as the
lifting of the Medicare ban on sex reassignment surgeries, these
bulletins are paving the way for a growing nationwide consensus that
transgender people deserve the right to get the health insurance
coverage and health care they need to live authentic lives.
It is no exaggeration to say that the future of the LGBT health
movement will be built on the foundation that Andy helped to lay. The
full scope of everything he did in his work on behalf of all of us is
hard to pin down, however — both because it was so huge and because he
was so modest about himself and his contributions. Andy was never
flashy, and throughout his career he toiled away behind the scenes every
day to make things better and to create more change than any of us will
ever be able to fully comprehend.
A couple of years ago, for example, Andy was asked to work with Cyndi
Lauper to put together an op-ed about one of the driest, if most hotly
contested, topics in DC — sequestration and the debt-ceiling
negotiations. The rock-goddess-turned-LGBTQ-youth-advocate wanted to
publish a piece that called out the politicians whose slashing of
federal funds supporting social service programs around the country
would have disastrous consequences for the staggering percentage of
America’s out-of-home youth who are LGBTQ.
The first draft that Andy came up with was, well, wonky. All of the
facts were right and the logic of the argument was impeccable, but it
was missing the human element — Andy was so modest that he had even
managed to put his celebrity author in the background. His boss at the
time, Jeff Krehely, told Andy to go do every 20-something’s dream: watch
a few hours of YouTube videos on company time and come back talking
like Cyndi Lauper.
The piece he came up with was a masterpiece — an impassioned,
outraged call to action, in Cyndi’s voice proclaiming, “We all need to
make sure Washington hears us on this one – for ourselves and for youth
who are struggling and lack a voice of their own. There’s too much at
stake to simply tune this out. We need to make some noise of our own.”
No one but a handful us ever knew, of course, that those words in the
pages of Rolling Stone were Andy’s. And that’s how he worked — he had
not only the talent so evident in the elegance of the writing, and the
ability to code-switch between policy wonk and rock star to get his
point across, but the humility to work behind the scenes, to put his
best work out there without needing to be recognized or applauded for
it.
So I’m going to suggest that each of us take a moment now to applaud
Andy — for his exceptional passion, for his creativity, brilliance, and
the incredible work that he accomplished. Thank you, Andy, for your
life, your love, and your work. We will all miss you more than you will
ever know.
Supporters