They Kept His Word. I Entered It Into Evidence.
They asked one another what to do with me.
Nobody asked me what was happening in my mind.
I was the person they were with. How did I become the person who did not get to know?
Monster's Week
This week, I Know Tings enters Monster’s Week—a descent into the monsters people create, protect, obey, and hide beneath familiar faces. It only feels right to arrive here in October, beneath Scorpio skies, surrounded by decomposition, revelation, underworld movement, and all the spooky tings that ask us to look directly at what has been buried.
But these monsters are not costumes. This is not Halloween dress-up. They are beliefs made flesh. Family arrangements that survive by consuming the truth. Masculinity swollen by protection. Faith used as camouflage. People made monstrous by everything they refuse to examine within themselves.
Monster’s Week asks what becomes visible when the pleasant face can no longer conceal the rotting structure beneath it.
I Know Tings
Unchecked Black masculinity does not require one man to be exceptional. It survives through private conversations, sexual entitlement, religious authority, housing threats, family silence, and people willing to call control protection.
Through Mycelial Sankofa, I return to the names—and to my late, on-paper autism diagnosis—to examine what happened when Black men were permitted to know and use my body without ever becoming curious about my mind.
They Kept His Word. I Entered It Into Evidence.
Late Autism Diagnosis & Abuse
The Names Are Still Here
Jonathan.
Kent.
Matt.
Kevin.
Three Michaels.
Ola.
Oluwole.
Momo.
Mandale
Antonio
That other DC Negro whose name misses me, as it should.
The other one from when I was on the KC fellowship.
Will.
Jaraven.
Collus.
There are others.
I am naming who comes back to me. Some arrive clearly. Some arrive as a place, a period, an interaction I remember better than the person’s name. Forgetting a name does not mean my body forgot the encounter.
And remembering a name does not mean I owe it tenderness.
The list is not exhaustive. I could keep going, but I have already spent enough of my life making room for these people. I want to examine what occupied that room.
Across my interactions with these individuals, I kept encountering a desire for power over my body. Specifically sexual power. They wanted access, and with that access came expectations about who would get to dictate the body being accessed.
I was there with a mind.
A history.
An appetite.
A capacity to observe them.
A life capable of changing direction.
But the body they wanted kept being treated as though the person living inside it was an inconvenience to the arrangement.
Then there is Ron Curry.
The man whose behavior helped teach me what authority at home could get away with.
He belongs in this account too.
Four Names. A Conversation I Never Received.
Matt.
Jonathan.
Kent.
Kevin.
Those are the four I know Ron Curry pulled aside. These four are enough to examine what happened.
Ron Curry would pull someone I was supposedly dating away from me. I do not know what was said. None of them came back and told me.
I was the one in partnership with them. Whatever relationship we were attempting to have was with me. Yet a conversation involving Ron Curry could happen outside my presence and remain outside my knowledge.
Nobody gave me the transparency of saying: this is what Ron said.
Nobody allowed me to hear it, respond to it, correct it, or decide what it meant for our relationship.
They kept whatever passed between them.
I kept the absence.
I can imagine what Ron might have said. I have lived with enough of his behavior to have an imagination about it. But imagination is not a transcript, and I do not need a transcript to know that I was excluded.
That exclusion is already an event.
Whatever their intentions, the effect was that Ron Curry’s words stayed protected from my examination. Their silence left me trying to participate in relationships without information the other person possessed.
I was the person they were with.
How did I become the person who did not get to know?
The Body Was Supposed to Stay Available
The sexual power I am talking about did not stay neatly inside sexual encounters. It reached into the ordinary parts of being alive.
Food.
Weight.
The kitchen.
What I wanted to change about my own body.
I think about the last cis man I was engaging with. Whenever I mentioned wanting to lose weight, I encountered resistance that read to me as an effort to keep me fat. Their preference kept entering the conversation as though it should govern what I wanted for myself.
There is a particular disrespect in somebody liking your body so much that they stop listening to you about it.
They can desire the shape and disregard the person. They can enjoy the body while resisting its capacity to change. Suddenly your own intention becomes a problem because it interrupts what they would like to keep receiving.
I am allowed to be fat.
I am allowed to want to lose weight.
I am allowed to change my mind.
None of those possibilities requires a lover’s permission.
I have already examined bodily hierarchy in Social Rank of Fatness: the categories people build around a body, and what happens when the person living in it brings information that unsettles the category. Here that pressure enters through desire.
Somebody wants the body to remain in the form they prefer, and my decision to change it becomes something they believe they can contest.
Their attraction does not give them custody of my size.
Then there was the monitoring around food. Even preparing chicken became an occasion for telling me what I could not do: I could not season it in the sink.
I was working in a sink I had cleaned, with the intention of cleaning it again afterward. I knew what I was doing in my own kitchen. Yet there I was, being instructed and corrected again.
The point is how much of ordinary life became available for somebody else to supervise.
An interaction at the sink belongs beside the comments about my weight because I was encountering the same presumption: they could position themselves over my judgment.
I could not simply cook. I had to deal with somebody appointing themselves an authority over the person cooking.
My body was wanted sexually, but its appetite, movement, decisions, and knowledge kept meeting interference.
What kind of relationship can receive my body but cannot receive information from me?
This meets the question I have been carrying through They Were Comfortable Summoning Blackness: what happens when somebody wants what a Black body offers but cannot receive that person’s authority, discernment, or refusal? These encounters have their own histories. But desire keeps being offered as evidence of care while the person being desired has to fight to remain present in the relationship.
And the kitchen already has a life in this Cosmos. In The Six Waters of Food, I am learning through preparation, taste, repetition, and adjustment. My hands and appetite participate in that knowledge. A person entering the kitchen enters a practice I am already building. What does it mean to meet that practice by trying to supervise me?
They Wanted the Body. Nobody Asked About the Mind.
I am autistic.
Not metaphorically.
Not as a casual identity.
Not NeuroSpicy.
I am autistic on paper, diagnosed late, and that diagnosis is serious.
The paper did not make me autistic. It made official what people had been willing to punish, ridicule, exploit, or ignore without ever becoming curious about it.
None of these men asked what might actually be happening in my mind. Nobody asked how I processed fear, sex, consent, attachment, authority, overwhelm, or contradiction.
Nobody asked whether there was a reason I experienced and remembered interactions with such intensity. Nobody asked what grooming had already taught me to tolerate.
They did not need to understand my mind to keep seeking access to my body.
They had language for what they thought was wrong with me. Stupid. Not clever. Alcoholic. Unstable. Too much. Ron had those words too. He could repeatedly tell me that something was wrong with me without ever asking whether something was happening within me that required care, language, or accommodation.
That arrangement was useful. If I was simply defective, nobody had to examine what they were taking from me.
What does it say about a procession of Black men who believed they needed access to my body but never believed they needed a relationship with my mind? It should sound and feel hella familiar.
Like cotton boles picked by caloused over mammy numb hands.
This is not an argument that autism made me incapable of consent. It did not. This is an account of how grooming, OCD, disability, unrecognized processing differences, and a learned obligation to remain available shaped what I understood myself to owe other people.
They were not protecting a vulnerable person they had taken the time to know.
They were protecting continued access to a body whose mind they found inconvenient.
Ron Was Already Teaching
Ron thinks his behavior reads as protection.
It reads to me as bullying, anger, and instability.
What His Protection Meant in Practice.
Ron’s protection had paperwork.
He canceled my first business license.
When I could not pay rent, he placed an eviction notice and threatened to file with the sheriff’s office.
Yes, I was living there with a then-boyfriend who was a bum. I was also doing anything and everything I could to survive and build a life. The presence of one failing man did not make it acceptable for Ron to turn my housing into another weapon.
He threatened to call the police on me multiple times.
He waited for me to wake up so that he could specifically attack me.
That detail matters. This was not always an argument that unexpectedly escalated. Sometimes there was intention. Sometimes he had already decided what would happen before I entered the room.
In one experience, he cursed me out of the house so violently that I had to escape in my vehicle.
These incidents belong to a longer pattern of physical and verbal abuse that extended across the entirety of my relationship with him. His protection did not make me safer. It kept reminding me that my housing, work, body, and physical freedom could become conditional whenever he wanted to demonstrate authority.
Protection that requires eviction threats, police threats, planned attacks, and bodily fear is not protection.
It is domination with family branding.
And I am talking about repeated violence. Violence I experienced on my own body.
Violence I repeatedly saw him direct toward my mother, verbally and physically. I witnessed physical violence toward my mother in Denver, Colorado.
I saw it a lot.
His raging anger.
He was also MIA a lot. His absence belongs in the record alongside what happened when he was there. I grew up with both: the man who was missing and the man whose presence could bring violence.
So this story that he was safe, that he was protecting me, that I somehow owe him an apology, has to pass through what I actually experienced and witnessed.
I am not waiting for either of them to acknowledge it before I can say it happened.
The record includes me.
I learned masculinity through that behavior. Through Ron Curry and his brothers.
Through what they did, what they were permitted to deny, and what everybody else was expected to absorb afterward.
The examples of Black manhood I grew up around were violent.
Reckless.
Unaccountable.
Belligerent.
They could cause harm and then lie about the harm they caused. The lie became another demand placed on the people who had already endured the behavior.
Now we had to live with what happened and with the version of events that allowed them to remain innocent of it.
My parents became wrapped in so many accounts of themselves that, from where I stood, they could no longer reliably separate what they had told from what they had concealed. Ron kept selling a version of Ron that my experience could not recognize.
My mother kept trying to make that version real.
And I keep wondering how much life can be spent maintaining a man who has never actually arrived.
Because the performance requires labor. Somebody has to explain him. Defend him. Remember which account is currently in use. Translate anger into concern. Translate bullying into protection. Ask the person harmed to be more generous with the person doing the harm.
Everybody is working on the man’s behalf.
Who is working on behalf of the people living with him?
A New Religion (cult). The Same Seat.
For most of my life, Ron did not go to church. I remember arguments because my mother wanted him to go and he would not.
Now he is a Black Hebrew, with loc’d hair.
Silently screaming inside and laughing in full.
go get a hair cut.
sitting at the head of the table, talking about honor and masculinity.
I remember the person before this presentation. I remember what he practiced when there was no religious language attached to it.
So when honor enters the room, I have questions.
What have you acknowledged?
What have you repaired?
What can the people you harmed say in your presence without being subjected to another performance of authority?
A new vocabulary does not make those questions disappear. It gives me another place to ask them.
Because if religion supplies more reasons for everybody else to defer while leaving the behavior untouched, the person at the head of the table has acquired another means of remaining there.
That is the delusion I recognize in the Black manliness Ron and his brothers modeled: authority treated as evidence of itself. The demand to be honored arrives before an honest account of what they have done with the power they already had.
I have lived too close to the consequences to confuse that demand with strength.
What the Household Made Familiar
None of the men I named had, as I understood their histories, a relationship with a father who was actually helping form them into a decent, accountable human being. Their circumstances differed. But I did not see the kind of fathering people invoke when they talk about men teaching boys how to become men. If I am being honest, men teaching boys to become men is what we know of black manhood, and it has always been a scam.
Some carried family histories that reminded me of Ron’s own: a mother put in situations they should never have had to endure, and a child growing inside the consequences.
That history matters. It also matters what the grown person does with it.
I know what it means to have been formed under conditions I did not choose. I also know that other people should not have to surrender their bodies so I can avoid examining those conditions.
We say you are what you eat. I have been thinking about what a household feeds you before you have any say in the meal.
Force-Fed.
What becomes ordinary there?
What gets called love?
Whose anger organizes the day?
Who is expected to explain themselves, and who can simply issue an instruction?
The household also taught me that somebody’s body could become payment for protection.
My mother’s poor mental health existed inside an arrangement where she allowed Ron to take deep advantage of her body so that the relationship could continue to function as protection. She was harmed inside that arrangement. She also left me unprotected from what the arrangement normalized.
Whatever happened to me, happened to me.
I do not have to pretend she had no constraints in order to say that her choices had consequences for my body. I watched male authority receive accommodation, explanation, sexual access, and another chance. I watched the people living with that authority absorb whatever it cost.
That was grooming before any individual man arrived. Not necessarily one explicit instruction, but an entire household education in bodily availability: what a body was expected to surrender, ignore, or survive to keep an arrangement intact.
By the time other men wanted access to me, I already had an education in what protection supposedly required from the person being protected.
Those lessons can enter later relationships before you recognize them as lessons. Familiarity can give a harmful arrangement somewhere to land.
That is what I am examining when I return to these names. How did the authority I grew up around keep becoming recognizable in the people I encountered? What had I been trained to accommodate before I could identify what accommodation was costing me?
I am queer and married queerly. My sibling is married to a white man.
Those are our lives, and our parents do not get to narrate them while refusing to examine the examples of Black masculinity they placed before us.
What exactly were we supposed to recognize as desirable?
What were we supposed to carry forward?
Rotate the Account
This is where Mycelial Sankofa enters the work.
I return through several points: a name, a withheld conversation, a memory of Ron Curry, resistance to my changing body, an instruction in the kitchen. Bringing them into relationship lets me examine how authority moved across experiences I once held separately.
The connections do not make every person identical. They make the pattern available for examination.
My methodology requires knowledge to move through relationship. Here, I am looking at relationships in which my knowledge was repeatedly obstructed. People could touch me, speak about me, desire me, and direct me while leaving what I knew outside the exchange.
The network had routes for their preferences.
Where were the routes for mine?
The Alternator Was Already Dying has already brought me into this circuitry: a request for help returning as a demand for obedience, my mother’s care routed through allegiance to this man. Here, I am examining another route. A person dating me could enter a private conversation with Ron and leave me outside what passed between them. Different encounters, but my access to information and care kept becoming conditional on an arrangement I had not chosen.
My late diagnosis changes how I read this network.
It does not make every man identical.
It does not make me incapable of knowing what happened. It clarifies the conditions under which I was forced to know it.
What people called stupidity, instability, alcoholism, defiance, excess, or confusion may have included an autistic mind navigating grooming, OCD, overwhelm, coercion, and repeated misattunement without language or accommodation.
The diagnosis does not excuse what anyone did.
It returns personhood to the behavior they found useful to pathologize.
I can return to that history carrying information that changes whether I remain available to it.
Remembering gives me somewhere to begin that examination. Refusal gives the knowledge somewhere to go.
The Roll Call Is Mine Now
Jonathan.
Kent.
Matt.
Kevin.
Two Michaels.
Ola.
Oluwole.
Momo.
The names that miss me (some I am being nice, because I absolutely remember you).
Will.
Anthony.
Jaraven.
Collus.
And the others.
I am not arranging these names to make everybody’s conduct interchangeable. I am keeping the people visible while I account for what my interactions with them taught me.
My distrust of Black men has a history. It was learned through encounters in which my body was wanted and my authority over it was contested. I will not offer trust simply because somebody believes shared Blackness should have already settled the question.
Trust would require conduct I can actually trust.
And Ron Curry belongs in the record of how I learned to ask for that.
Ron Curry does not get to stand outside the examination because he was there first.
Being there first gave his behavior more time to shape what I understood as ordinary.
Now I can examine that ordinary.
I can name what I know. Leave what I do not know unresolved. Recognize the connection without giving any of these people another claim on me.
I am autistic on paper.
That paper cannot return what was taken from me. It cannot make anybody curious retroactively. But it changes who gets believed in the record.
I was never merely a body around which men could negotiate access. I was a disabled Black person whose mind they repeatedly chose not to know.
Their failure to ask was not protection.
Their willingness to keep taking was not care.
They kept whatever Ron Curry and the Black men they came from said.
I kept the names.
And I get to say what they bring back.
P.S.
I am not waiting for either of them to acknowledge it before I can say it happened.The record includes me.
I did attempt to reengage a relationship with my mother. I have not attempted to reengage one with Ron, and I will not.
Those are not the same decision.
This essay is not an indirect conversation with him. It is not an invitation for his explanation, apology, or return. I do not need contact with him to complete the record.
My refusal is not a missing step toward reconciliation. It is a response to the seriousness of what he did—and to the seriousness of what people allowed to happen to me while continuing to protect him.
Several of these men now have daughters or femme-facing children. Some are raising children who are queer or have learning disabilities.
That frightens me. In a BIG way.
It is not funny. It is not cool. Fatherhood does not interrupt a pattern a man refuses to examine. A daughter is not an accountability program. A queer or disabled child should not have to become the body through which a grown man finally discovers that domination has consequences.
The behavior documented here does not disappear because these men now call themselves fathers. Without examination, it continues—through surveillance, shame, dismissal, bodily control, forced legibility, and the insistence that masculine authority is protection.
I think Black men formed and protected by this version of masculinity are dangerous. Men who expect access without curiosity, authority without accountability, and forgiveness without repair are dangerous.
The men I am naming were dangerous to me.
Children growing up near the same structure deserve more than our hope that fatherhood somehow changed them.
They Kept His Word.
I Entered It Into Evidence.
Cosmos Watershed
This essay enters through Deep Water, where names, withheld conversations, witnessed violence, and childhood memory remain in the body’s record. Turbulent Water exposes sexual entitlement, bullying, secrecy, and the demand to call control protection. Tidal Water follows what the household made familiar into later encounters. Still Water holds the distinction between what I know and what remains unresolved. Flowing Water protects the body’s capacity to change, choose, cook, move, and refuse. Sacred Water asks what honor requires when the person demanding it has not accounted for the harm.
Watershed | Tributaries |
Watershed | Deep Water moving through Turbulent and Tidal Water, with Still, Flowing, and Sacred Water carrying discernment, bodily authority, and accountable relationship |
Relationship | Body ↔ sexual desire ↔ secrecy ↔ household authority ↔ violence ↔ absence ↔ food ↔ memory ↔ refusal |
Hom(e)ie | The roll call: names held in an embodied record that remains open beyond the people listed |
Origin | Four confirmed private conversations with Ron Curry that Matt, Jonathan, Kent, and Kevin never brought back to Kiing |
Expansion | A wider history of sexual entitlement meets food and weight monitoring, repeated violence, frequent absence, family mythology, and religious authority |
Application | Name what is known; leave unseen conversations unresolved; examine what familiarity trained the body to accommodate; require trustworthy conduct |
Lineage | Mycelial Sankofa; Black queer embodied knowledge; relational examination; the body as a participant in the record |
Counter Currents | Secrecy treated as loyalty; bullying renamed protection; attraction treated as bodily authority; violence erased by family performance; religious honor demanded without accountability |
Cosmos Coordinates
Coordinate | Placement |
Primary Portal | I Know Tings |
Connected Waters | Deep Water; Turbulent Water; Tidal Water; Still Water; Flowing Water; Sacred Water |
Tings Connections | Trans Learn Tings; Afro Tings; I Eat Tings; I Move Tings |
Primary Methodology | Mycelial Sankofa |
Methodological Practice | Return across names, remembered encounters, witnessed conduct, bodily information, and present discernment; examine their relationships without flattening their differences |
Embodiment Movements | Intuition; Regulation; Integration; Movement |
Cosmos Concepts | Embodied record; relational authority; discernment; access; refusal; inherited familiarity; the distinction between desire and care |
Geographic Coordinate | Denver, Colorado: the explicitly named location of witnessed physical violence toward Kiing’s mother. DC: remembered encounters within the wider roll call. |
Relational Coordinate | Whether the person whose body is desired can receive information, contribute knowledge, and exercise authority within the relationship |
Temporal Coordinate | Childhood violence and absence ↔ dating history ↔ recent bodily supervision ↔ present naming and refusal |
Orientation | Perspectival return across multiple encounters; known events and unresolved information remain distinct |
Core Refrain | They kept his word. I kept the names. |
Core Inquiry | I was the person they were with. How did I become the person who did not get to know? |
Expansion Principle | Bodily knowledge must be able to alter a relationship; attraction, familiarity, and household authority cannot replace accountability |
Calabash Relationship | The record carries names, memory, and unresolved information without requiring Kiing to carry the men’s secrecy or preserve their preferred account |
Wata(ring) W(hole) Relationship | Sexuality, appetite, movement, memory, and discernment belong to the same living body; power exercised in one area reaches the others |
Cosmos Constellations
Constellation | How it enters this essay | What it makes visible |
Mycelial Sankofa | Names, secrecy, violence, kitchen encounters, and bodily change enter relationship through return. | A pattern can become perceptible without inventing missing information or making every encounter identical. |
The embodied record | Kiing remembers direct experience and repeated witnessed violence. | A witness’s knowledge does not depend on acknowledgment from the people involved. |
The roll call | Named people recur at the beginning, within the confirmed conversations, and at the close. | Accumulation has individual names; the list remains nonexhaustive. |
Social Rank of Fatness | Weight and bodily change meet another person’s preferred category of desirability. | Attraction can become a demand that the body remain available in its assigned form. |
They Were Comfortable Summoning Blackness | Desire and access are examined beside the refusal of a Black person’s authority. | Wanting what a body offers does not establish care for the person who can say no. |
The Six Waters of Food | Cooking, appetite, preparation, and adjustment enter as existing practices of bodily knowledge. | Food supervision interferes with a living practice the person is already cultivating. |
The Alternator Was Already Dying | Care routed through allegiance and obedience meets information withheld through private conversations. | Different channels can preserve the same man’s authority while restricting Kiing’s access. |
Trans Learn Tings | A Black queer person examines the gendered expectations assigned to their body and relationships. | Masculine authority cannot define the limits of another person’s bodily life. |
The Wata(ring) W(hole) | Sexual access reaches into food, weight, memory, and daily decisions. | The consequences of control move through the whole body. |
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