As soon as I saw the title “Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature” (by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian), I knew I wanted to read this book. It’s been all over the 2025 “best of” lists, from Time to Vanity Fair to Vulture, and it’s easy to see why this one is resonating so intensely given what the last year has meant to LGBTQ+ folks. The queer expansiveness and community-building of Kaishian’s book is an effective emotional antidote to all the anti-trans scare tactics and fake biological essentialism accelerating on the Right.
I recently had a friendship-ending argument with someone I’d known and loved for thirty years regarding whether “normal” nature allows more than two sexes. I wish at the time, I’d had at hand Kaishian’s example of leopard slugs, who mate in pairs by intertwining the blue penises which emerge from the head of each partner during coitus. Hot stuff, and very queer!
Like the blue head-phalluses of two leopard slugs, Kaishian’s book is a productive intertwining: she creates a manifesto for non-binary natural science through a mix of personal memoir, queer theory, and cool science facts. As Kaishian slips between her own history, her field and academic research in mycology and biology, and the intergenerational traumas of her Armenian and Irish Catholic heritage, you quickly feel that this book is the accumulation of Kaishian’s love — love, which is perhaps the queerest thing of all.
As an example, in one passage, Kaishian talks about the labouls that are her particular study. Labouls are a kind of fungus so specialized that some species will only live on one segment of the leg of one particular type of beetle. Kaishian writes:
But in the labouls, I see what I love most about fungi — their unassuming ways of being, their queerness, their daring subversion of capitalist utility. Labouls are not going to save the world, not should they have to. I love them anyway. I love their resplendence, only visible under the microscope, only when someone who loves them is looking carefully. (90)
To be loved and to be looked at carefully — I felt so touched by these reciprocal needs Kaishian finds in a fungus that calls the foreleg of a beetle home. It felt truly nourishing to me to feel these unexpected connections in a time of such violent human isolation and deprivation. And I will absolutely be rereading this book when I feel lonely again.
