On an early spring evening in Albany, around 400 people filtered through the cavernous galleries inside the New York State Museum. They had come to see and hear about the work of Mary Elizabeth Banning, a 19th-century mycologist whose profound contributions to science were largely and unjustly overlooked for nearly 100 years. Now, her celebrated work draws a sizable audience on a Friday night.
A perceptive observer and keen artist, Banning produced hundreds of exquisite watercolor illustrations documenting the defining features of the mushrooms she encountered in the woods, each accompanied by florid yet precise handwritten descriptions. “Fungi are considered vegetable outcasts,” she wrote. “Like beggars by the wayside dressed in gay attire, they ask for attention but claim none.”
The exhibition, titled Outcasts, portrayed a relationship between beings typically marginalized by science and society—or as exhibition organizer Dr. Patricia Kaishian described it, “outcast organisms studied by outcast people,” the maligning of mushrooms part of a piece with the story of a woman’s struggle to study them in a male-dominated world.
Mushrooms may seem a strange proxy for conversations about social equity. Yet their unfamiliar forms and ways of life have seen them increasingly raised up as exemplars of nature’s myriad approaches to identity and relation—what one might describe as queerness.
“Part of the reason for this negative perception is the way that fungi defy categorization,” Kaishian told the crowd. “They are often transgressing our conception of the individual; they forge interspecies partnerships; they form connections between cells and between living species; and they can be ephemeral and transient—here today, gone tomorrow.”
As the curator of mycology for the New York State Museum—the first to hold the role in 18 years—Kaishian’s primary task is to chronicle the fungal biodiversity of the state. However, she also has a gift for articulating the social and environmental issues that natural sciences can involve or reveal. As climate change worsens—along with conflict and oppression rooted in resurgent, reductive hierarchies of gender, sexuality, nationhood, and neurodivergence—Kaishian celebrates nature’s endlessly diverse ways of being and relating through the lens of science.
In the introduction to her forthcoming debut book, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature, Kaishian names snakes as her “first love.” First, at least, among the marginalized and maligned creatures with whom she developed a close affinity growing up in the woods of New York’s Hudson Valley. Kaishian describes her childhood in semi-feral terms, spent clamoring among culverts and mossy ditches to commune with amphibians, insects, and other creepy-crawlies many people dismiss or disdain.
Part popular science, part social critique, part memoir, the book reveals some of the countless ways nature defies humanity’s attempts to categorize or constrain it. As Kaishian developed a deep sense of interspecies kinship, she also came to grips with her own multifaceted identity as Armenian and Irish, as a woman, as neurodivergent, as queer.
“I know queerness is an identity, but to me it’s much more than that,” she told me. “It’s a way of understanding what our ethical obligations are to each other, to other people, and other species.”
I first met Kaishian in 2019 at the New Moon Mycology summit in the Adirondack Mountains. Just around the bend from a hand-painted banner strung up between two trees that read “myceliate the state,” she presented on the topic of queer mycology—a field exploring the intersection of queer and fungi studies. How can anyone suggest that nature establishes sex or gender as “either-or” when, for instance, certain species of mushrooms express around 23,000 mating types? One particular slide in Kaishian’s presentation stuck with me: a simple line drawing of scribbly chaos reaching out from within a square, with the caption, “Don’t put me in a box.”
Through scientific observation, Kaishian reveals the common dignity and responsibility that all living beings share. Not unlike fungi, which connect with so much else in nature, the liberation of humans connects with that of more than human life: biodiversity with human diversity. This principle is at the heart of Forest Euphoria, which looks to the likes of slugs, cicadas, crows, and, of course, mushrooms and snakes to weave a scientifically informed and deeply personal account of the “abounding queerness” of nature.
A few weeks after the museum event, Kaishian drove us to her research site: a forest preserve tucked into the hills of New York’s Capital Region. Her all-wheel-drive car was festooned with foraged mushrooms—a common habit among committed mycophiles—not unlike the bricolaged nests of bowerbirds Kaishian describes in Forest Euphoria as an example of more-than-human aesthetic and even romantic desire.
The first sound we heard upon arriving was from a woodpecker just beyond the treeline. Then, just as loud, though much farther away, the claxons of some giant, unseen industrial vehicle. “Part of me would like to be in a pristine spot,” Kaishian said lamentingly, “but the spots that are marginal or transitional are important to study.”
Our traipse through the defrosting forest started around noon. We crossed a sketchy bridge over a burbling creek and followed the trail for a few minutes until the impulse came to veer straight into the woods. “I find the most things when I can follow my own sensing of the landscape,” she told me. This seemingly less-than-systematic approach is appropriate and also somewhat unique to surveying fungi, which are often ephemeral and unpredictable. Much about their biology and ecology is still largely mysterious.
The location was chosen in part for the variety of trees that congregate in distinct stands: hemlock, beech, mixed oak, and maple. Another consideration was the general lack of visitors, suiting Kaishian’s research and personal proclivities.
“To be honest, if I see people when I’m here, I hide from them,” she disclosed as a hiker appeared down the trail from us. “I’m extra motivated to do that when I’m here for science; I don’t like to draw attention to places where people might go to get mushrooms.” Instead of hiding, we simply greeted the passerby, though I wondered if she would have done otherwise had I not been present.
After a long, cold winter, the mushrooms were also hiding. Most visible were bright orange cinnabar polypores (Pycnoporus cinnabarinus) and amber jellies (Exidia recisa). We also encountered somewhat more “charismatic” species: a tinder conk bursting through a tree like a fat fist, enormous old reishi mushrooms fanning out from fallen trees, and Chlorociboria infusing blue chroma into rotting branches. Kaishian photographs every mushroom she sees and collects any that are particularly interesting, logging the habitat, substrate, abundance, and “vibe of the spot.”
“I like to cover a good amount of ground, even if I’m not collecting anything,” Kaishian explained, our boots crunching through the leaf litter. “If I cover a similar amount of ground as I would in peak mushroom season and find nothing, that’s information.”
Some unsettling things had also followed us into the woods. When we met that morning, Kaishian and I were both reeling from the news of a green card holder arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a citizenship interview in Vermont. Kaishian’s husband, who is from Nigeria, was scheduled for a citizenship test in just over a week, and this naturally had her worried.
She told me that being in the lab affords an opportunity to shut out the wider world. Still, societal undertones naturally seep into the study of other beings—particularly those misunderstood or under threat. The theory of evolution shows clearly that all living things are relatives, a reality that can sit askew to the much older, essentially reductive practice of taxonomy.
“Taxonomy is something that categorizes and places things into boxes, and there’s a real utility in that, just as there’s utility and understanding key social differences or demographic differences,” Kaishian said. “Sometimes it does overemphasize the difference between things, and underemphasizes the ways in which things are embedded in these really complex interactive systems.”
Kaishian speaks of close observation of other beings as a kind of bearing witness, which is meaningful in the context of biodiversity loss as well as various plights faced by humans, even if only as a first step of recognition and relating. Science may or may not be able to contribute to the conservation of a species, but working to better know them is still worthwhile. Even if one cannot prevent the destruction of a species, or a people, surely there is some value in at least recognizing their existence and experience.
”I’m not comparing a singular species extinction to a whole genocide, but obviously, genocide and large-scale species extinctions are linked, so I don’t feel bad about kind of drawing comparisons between those things,” she said. Kaishian has been outspoken, for instance, on the liberation struggles of Armenians and Palestinians, among other oppressed peoples. This is not always met warmly; one person responded to Kaishian’s public statements of solidarity by seeking to have her fired from the museum. That effort failed, and Kaishian does not intend to subdue her advocacy, which she treats as inseparable from her science.
“I feel like it’s important for me to cultivate community in my career and keep things really intertwined, and keep my science surrounded in movements of liberation,” she said. “So I do my best to try to integrate lessons of interdependencies.”
“I KNOW QUEERNESS IS AN IDENTIY, BUT TO ME IT’S MUCH MORE THAN THAT. IT’S A WAY OF UNDERSTANDING WHAT OUR ETHICAL OBLIGATIONS ARE TO EACH OTHER, TO OTHER PEOPLE, AND OTHER SPECIES.”
DR. PATRICIA KAISHIAN, MYCOLOGIST AND AUTHOR OF FOREST EUPHORIA
Most of the life we encountered on our hike was not fungal. Springtails gathered into chittering rafts that drifted in boggy pools; frog eggs floated in the glowing green grotto beneath a rotted log. “I wish I was born in there,” Kaishian said offhandedly, and sincerely. Following the contour of an old carriage road, we encountered a garter snake passing in the opposite direction. It stopped our ramble cold as we stooped to admire the slithering beauty of Kaishian’s “first love.”
Her love for fungi didn’t emerge until after her freshman year of college in 2010. Kaishian describes in her book experiencing a caterpillar-like metamorphosis. At the time, she was processing the trauma of abuse at the hands of a childhood doctor, struggling in school, and overdrinking. A four-day naturalist certification course administered by Cornell University introduced her to fungi and mycology, paving the way for her research career.
In that career, appropriately enough, Kaishian has managed to find one of the most neglected taxonomic groups on which to focus her research: Laboulbeniales, a fungus found only on the exoskeletons of insects. These could perhaps be considered among the least charismatic fungi of all, though she notes, “They’ve always been pretty charismatic to me.”
Kaishian told me that she previously thought her deep personal affinity for her subjects, her apparent lack of objectivity in studying them, made her a “bad scientist,” but she no longer thinks of objectivity as the sole mark of good science. It is in this indeterminate middle space that she resonates with a growing audience as a science communicator, a teacher, and now an author articulating a socially conscious concept of natural science.
“I think one of the biggest goals of my book is to help facilitate a deeper relationship to nature for readers,” she said as we approached the trailhead to leave the forest preserve. “I chose organisms or systems that I had a lot of actual intimacy with, through childhood and currently.”
The weather had changed significantly since we entered the woods, more misty and humid now. The thrum of distant machinery returned as we approached the exit, and only a handful of specimens had been collected. Kaishian bemoaned the absence of spring ephemeral flowers, but we nevertheless departed with a sense of abundance.
Kaishian spotted a chaga mushroom growing from a birch tree. It was high up, I noted, and so probably safe from overharvesting. This reminded her of something, and she reached into her pocket, producing a handful of chaga from a previous hike (taken from a fallen tree, she insisted I note), which she offered in case I would like to make some tea. The machinery operators could probably hear my delighted laugh from a mile away, and of course, I accepted the offer. I thanked her for it—and Kaishian thanked the woods as we left.
Correction,
May 28, 2025 8:24 am
ET
This story was edited to reflect that frog eggs were floating in the grotto during the forest walk. A previous version of this story incorrectly called them eel eggs.
Biome
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