Queer By Nature
I am listening to the rain—the constant splish-splash that defines the Western Ghats in the monsoon, ranging from gentle drizzles to heavy downpours—as it transforms the landscape into a moss-carpeted, fungal-fruiting expanse. It is 2023, and I am spending time with a conservation NGO at a field site in Sakleshpur, Karnataka, learning how ecological research works and acquainting myself with the trees of the forest here. I came here to help with a project on understanding how abandoned coffee plantations affect rainforest regeneration, but the forest, with its many creatures, was calling.
One creature in particular catches my attention, despite its diminutive size: the mushroom. During the monsoon, they are everywhere, sprouting in all corners—the log right outside the field station, the stumps of dead trees, the trunks and branches of living ones and across the forest floor. I have been nurturing a growing interest in fungi ever since I learnt about underground mycelial networks, deepened by reading Patricia Kaishian’s article ‘The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline’, in which she explores fungi as queer organisms. This is what sparked my fascination—their queerness, the fact that some have 23,000 mating types or sexes, and that so little is known about them that we still don’t fully understand what triggers a mushroom to form.
The meadows of Sakleshpur and their rain-soaked forests (above) are home to many glorious varieties of mushrooms, seen here gill-side up (3). Photo: Thekadhuhithlu (1), Nitha Fathima (2), Nigel JP (3).
It is easy to think of fungi as queer. Patricia Kaishian writes about how queerness and fungi are themes that have been pushed to the margins, so often seen as strange or even disgusting. Like queerness, fungi resist the boxed categories we have invented. Fungi confounded humans when we first noticed them—neither plants nor animals. They defied every system of categorisation we had until we found new ways of classification, new names for the parts of these organisms we could observe. In fact, for the longest time, taxonomists grouped fungi with plants in their efforts to study them. They were recognised as an independent kingdom in the Tree of Life only in 1969.
Armed with the understanding that fungi are queer creatures who didn’t fit into boxes, like me, I began looking for them on field visits. I spotted more in a day of foraging in the forest than I’d seen in my entire life—stinkhorns growing by the roadside, a glorious patch of orange-colored cup fungi on a moss-covered branch, jelly fungi on living branches above our heads and polypores persisting on logs for weeks. They were proof that even what is reviled can exist and thrive in their own worldmaking, creating pockets in which their stories are told, even if these pockets are as small and inconsequential as a fallen leaf through which the mycelium has threaded, sprouting tiny mushrooms from its edges.
Fungi in the soil live as an underground network called mycelium, made up of branching, fusing cells known as hyphae. When conditions are right, this hidden web gives rise to fruiting bodies—mushrooms. A typical mushroom bears gills on its underside, where spores are produced and dispersed by wind, water or insects. In my wanderings, the mycelial world revealed itself to me in many forms. Sometimes, it was the stinkhorn, named for its foul smell, which lures insects to carry its spores. Found across India, it is easily recognised by a distinctive veil that drapes over it like a cloak. The puffball, another striking mushroom, holds its spores inside a spherical chamber that releases them in misty puffs when touched by the first rains, similar to smoke rising from a chimney. Once a spore lands on fertile ground, it sprouts new mycelium, continuing the age-old song of life and decay.
From the polypore (also known as a bracket mushroom) (1), to the stinkhorn (2) to the frosty bonnet (Mycena adscendens, 3), there is a wondrous spectrum of mycelial life to be found in the forest. Photos: Vis M (1), Sanath RM (2, 3).
But mushrooms are hardly the easiest species to identify. In his book Mushrooms Demystified, David Arora explains why he is grateful not to be a mushroom taxonomist—34 names had been accorded to a single species of mushroom over the years. It’s easy to see why when you look at mushrooms through a queer eye. Only a certain group of fungi produce mushrooms—many do not. Fungi can reproduce sexually, asexually or both. In sexual reproduction, specialised cells fuse to form a new individual, while asexual reproduction bypasses this fusion. Straddling these reproductive strategies offered fungi another chance to confuddle the humans who tried to categorize them.
Beyond their diverse reproductive modes, fungi also shift between distinct life stages—vegetative and reproductive—that can appear so different that they were once mistaken for separate species. It wasn’t until the advent of molecular tools that scientists were able to confirm whether these different life stages belonged to the same species or were, in fact, separate ones.
Underground, fungi pave the path for new kinds of life—they break rocks, recycle organic matter and provide a conducive space for plants to grow. In many ways, this reminds me of queerness: an identity that makes space for itself, imagining more realities than a cis-heteronormative world offers. Many people now form queer platonic partnerships, flattening relationship hierarchies that place sexual relationships above others. As my own world hyphaeted, friends brought over mushrooms of all kinds: fresh ones, printed ones and tiny decorative ones that began to clutter my table delightfully. It was a joy to have my fascination with mushrooms validated—far from those who would express disgust at the mere mention of fungi. Together, we were remaking our world with what we needed: found families, community and a practice of care that went beyond the traditionally mandated, unspoken rules.
What can we learn, together, with our found families? Mycodyke, a queer non-binary forager ‘crawling in the undergrowth’ around India, conducts ‘fungi forays’ and workshops, with the aim of ‘shifting perspectives and growing community’. Photos: Mycodyke.
Mycodyke, aka Malavika Bhatia, a mushroom forager from Delhi who conducts workshops on queer mycology , says, ‘To me, fungi do not reduce to the way they reproduce, but represent the vastness of the universe, which seems very queer to me. In a cis-heteronormative society, all that is infinite, that is not yet seen, that is queerness. And to me, that is mycelium. That is fungi. Fungi have a lot to teach us about how to live with other species and even what it means to be an individual.’
Mycelia break things down—everything from the lignin in plant cell walls to the explosive compound trinitrotoluene (TNT). They transform what surrounds them, even decay and waste, into nourishment. From dead plant matter to radioactive material, all food is fair game and all the world their stage. Maybe, in their own way, they will also break down queerness, making it more palatable to queerphobic communities, reminding us that queerness has always existed in nature. Much of queerness is also about rebuilding and reclaiming our worlds—creating our happy little gay bubbles despite the discrimination thrown our way. We craft spaces of joy, safety and kinship in the face of hostility. Like mycelia, queer communities make do, make change and make beauty from the margins.
Mycelium threads create an intricate network of connection in these images (AI-generated) which imagine what the world of this hyper-connected community looks like. Images: StockCake.
And then, there’s the way mycelia stick together. In early experiments, scientists noticed that when a single thread of mycelium touched a piece of wood, something it could digest, the entire network responded, growing towards it in sync. But when the potential food source was plastic, which the mycelium hadn’t evolved to digest, the network remained still. Communication pulsed invisibly through the fungal web. While we still don’t fully understand how it works, I think it’s beautiful that they did communicate with the whole network, that when they moved towards food, they left no one, no strand, behind.
Mycelia live such entangled lives that it’s hard to tell where one individual ends and another begins. It’s better to imagine them as a community: a living, breathing, sprawling network that survives and thrives together. This is queerness at its best—a community that laughs, works, grieves, dreams and dances in tandem. In that sense, it’s comforting to think of ourselves as mycelial: knowing we are not alone and that we can’t be separated, forever feeling, probing and weaving our way through the world of our own imagining and that of reality.
