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People without history are dust. Those whose testimony has been made structurally impossible are treated as being without value. The narrator of a life story in our culture must always be virtuous or must repent to become virtuous. A sinner who did not repent, the other cosntructed as deviant monster, is a priori sinful, and therefore can never tell their story. A person who has been categorized as devient from the start cannot in this logic have a voice. Since the victim society marked queer victims as deviant, they are barred from being able to tell their whole story. This perspective has shaped Holocaust archives and their politics of collecting, including the decisions of what ought to be collected and what ought not. As historians we work with those sources that exist, directly imprinting on what could be remembered, told, collected, and eventually written as suitable history. The sources that exist shape our own identity, our values, and our judgments.

Emanuel Ringelblum, the great Jewish historian and archivist of the Warsaw ghetto, raised the existential question "Who will write our history?" The queer Holocaust victims have become objects of what Gayatri Spivak has called "epistemic violence." They are not able to bear witness, they are not able to have a voice, and they have been prevented from leaving behind a trace of their own choice in history. They are a people without historical citizenship.

What can we take away from this analysis of erasure in order to write a queer history of the Holocaust? First is the necessity of an archaeological approach. This method allows us to deconstruct and analyse the homophobic stories that often represent the point of departure and which can lead us to traces of the real people emerging from these statements. The resulting studies can recuperate the persons from the homophobic anecdotes. The consequent history will likely still have gaps, but it will offer a narrative more inclusive than the heteronormative master narrative of Holocaust survivors."

"Among the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of testimonies by Holocaust survivors there are next to no explicitly queer voices. There are dozens of Holocaust archives with collections of self-narrated testimonies and oral histories, and yet among these are next to no first-person testimonies of people who are willingly engaged in same-sex intimacy and spoke about it. The four known expcetions are all German Jewish men who experienced the persecution as teenagers or young men and whose testimonies exist as published memoirs. The first and best known is the Berlin resistance fighter Gad Beck (*1923). Less well-known are two young German emigrants to the Netherlands who survived their deportation to the concentration camps, Gerald Rosenstein (*1927) and Walter Guttmann (*1928). Only one lesbian, Frieda Belinfante (*1904), a "half-Jewish" Dutch resistance fighter, bore testimony. In fact, while the last thirty years have been a fruitful era for feminist Holocaust scholarship, producing much nuanced and careful work, queer women's experiences are entirely missing. Survivors talking about queer sexual violence are rare, but present.

The absence of queer voices is striking for two reasons: first, the Holocaust is a genocide that has been extensively documented in terms of oral history interviews. Second, bearing witness was for survivors a meaningful reaction to coming to terms with mass violence. There are testimonies from nearly everyone, even magicians and people in mental asylums. Even people who experienced matters long considered too traumatic to speak about, such as victims of sexual violence or parents who killed their children, have given testimony.

One can observe the omission of queer experience in the case of the USC Shoah Foundation, which runs the Visual History Archive (VHA). The VHA is the world's largest archive of oral histories and perhaps the largest collection of any witness testimonies of the Shoah. The VHA has over fifty-two thousand interviews with people who were persecuted as Jews. In addition to this collection, they also hold interviews with other victim groups: victims of Armenian and Rwandan genocides, "Righteous among Nations" (non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust), and six gay gentile men persecuted under Nazi Germany's Paragraph 175. The interviews have all been keyworded, so a researcher can use the keywords to search for specific places or themes rather than looking through hundreds of thousands of hours of oral histories. There are keywords for homosexuality, homosexual kapo, and much more - some one thousand keywords altogether. But every single instance of testimony linked to these keywords leads to statements of outright homophobia. With the exception of Gad Beck, the largest oral history archive of Jewish Holocaust survivors does not have a single voice who explicitly spoke about his or her same-sex desire.

In 2010, I realized the existence of this gap. I reached out to colleagues at the VHA to address this silence. But these conversations turned out to be difficult. The colleagues repeatedly pointed out the existence of those six interviews with gay gentile survivors. I started to understand that influential categorization, in which all persecuted homosexuals are non-Jews and all Jewish victims are heterosexual; queerness and Jewish Holocaust victims did not overlap. This categorization was so embedded that it made my point about queer Holocaust survivors incommunicable. [...]

Through my research, I was able to find out that among the interviewees were in fact Holocaust survivors who willingly engaged in queer sex as well as those who identified as gay and lesbian. It was the framing of the interview, I believe, its heteronormative framework, that prevented survivors from mentioning their same-sex experience. This is particularly unfortunate, since most VHA interviews took place between 1994 and 1999, a quarter of a century after the Stonewall riots, the decriminalization of homosexuality in Germany, and the publication of the first well-known gay survivor memoir.

A specific technique of queer erasure can be observed in the interview of Irene Miller, a "half-Jewish" lesbian Ravensbrück survivor and resistance fighter from Prague, that she gave to the Jewish Family and Children's Services. Throughout her interview, Miller tried to mention her sexual orientation and her partner. her interviewer, a man, never let her: he would change the topic or say he was interested in something else. Perhaps he did not even register what Miller was trying to say because he didn't recognize it as relevant, being fixated on a heteronormative framework. In the keywords, Miller's partner Joanne is keyworded as "other relationship." When Miller was interviewed by lesbian scholars such as Christa Schikorra, she indicated this was her sexual orientation and referred to her queer biography.

Stories such as these draw our attention to the influence of social expectations and the key role of interviewer. For queer content, the people leading the oral histories too often reacted to mentions of queer intimacy with redirecting questions that normalized homophobia. Scholars of Holocaust testimonies have focused on the boundaries of the narratable that are dictated by the social expectations of the public or the unbearable. We should also pay attention to normative expectations of the interviewers who made bearing testimony impossible, or at least very hard. Part of this normativity was the homophobia of the interviewers, the prejudice that they possibly brought in from their understanding of queer inmates as deviant figures.

The final scene in the VHA interviews was yet another factor that made narrating a queer biorgraphy difficult. At this moment, the survivor was joined by his or her spouse, children and grandchildren. This scene staged a happy ending as a familial triumph over the destruction of the Holocaust. But this framing staged success as exclusively heteronormative, making it impossible to tell a story of a happy, queer life. While this ending is specific to the VHA, it serves as a useful indicator of the impact of normativity in Holocaust oral history collections at large. The childless, unmarried homosexual survivor was by this logic a social failure and thus not fit to bear witness."

Disintegration. Cleansing. Coevolution with trees, plants, wood as specialty. This all sounds familiar. Fungi eat charcoal. They are among the first signs of life after a forest fire has burned and sterilized everything else. Oyster mushrooms are used to convert toxins left in the wake of a blaze into usable nutrients for other life. Fungal fruit bodies have been used to carry fire from place to place by hominids for millennia. Black truffle mycelia chemically burn the earth around the tree they've colonized as a not so subtle "fuck you" to vegetation that would crowd them out. Some activists burning police motorcycles, earth movers, cement trucks, and the like, to keep Cop City from being built, have fungi as their mascot - as we'll see. Melanin makes fungal tissue fire tolerant. Fire, as I said, is not binary. It is destructive, constructive, the thing that marked us as human, and, as we change the climate to make it hotter, drier, a thing that may mark our end.

Laetiporus sulphureus blazing from a log, orange and yellow, a common beacon in my home woods; Flammulina velutipes, literally "little flame with velvet feet," periscoping from an elm snag, antifreeze in its tissue on a chill day in November, a fungus that has been to space; Lactarius pyrogalus, literally "fire milk," whose flesh can scorch tongues, feeding and being fed by a hornbeam. What work they do - fire, fungi - what glorious work in common! To make whole worlds smolder in memory, to move and lick and lap in shadow, to fruit sudden and vivid upon alchemical request. To take oxygen, to expel carbon dioxide. Fungi and fire are kin, which means, I guess, that I am family to fire. Combustion can be seen as the ancestor of breathing. Fungi, by helping plants onto land, oxygenated the atmosphere, and animals learned to breathe that poison, their respiration a slow burn."

But I'm Black, so the official story has never been of much use to me anyhow. If we want to survive -- those of us who have felt rootlessness without the possibility of future, who have considered suicide or done more than consider -- we have had to build alternative pasts for our futures to live in. Those stories are marginal and extralegal and anarchic and mycelial. You cannot kill them in a way that matters.

What happens when old stories teem with new futures? When I look to the likes of Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Tracy K. Smith and Fannie Lou Hamer and Minetta (see below) and Octavia Butler and Saidiya Hartman and Jamaica Kincaid and June Jordan and Fred Moten and James Baldwin - the list goes on - I see the building of our new cosmologies is well underway. The Earthbound cosmologies of water and land, steel and concrete, fire and ice. I want a fungal cosmology. I'm greedy, I want it to already exist. But the new worlds within this one already have counternarratives at their thresholds. Their building has been underway since that palm heel hit that first African drum in North America, spores scattering from the skin with each fateful slap.

Are our lineages mycelial rather than arboreal? Am I a fruiting body resulting from Spores in those sails rather than a leaf on a branch of a tree? It stands to reason, since it's the mycelium that does the true root work of a tree, family or otherwise."

Maybe I'm too smug in my knowledge that time will take its knee off her neck and start running away from her in every direction at once, relatively, soon. And in this possible world, where I am now, which I could give her the coordinates to, she'll want to chase after time, she'll make a game of bounding through the woods and cutting time off at the pass; she'll actually like trying to tame it. Maybe I'm too comfortable in her future, sipping tea surrounded by a riot of books in which the unofficial story, where she can star to make her home, unfolds. Even though we maybe can't relate, I want to try.

As she nears the vomiter fruit body that I've plucked in her future, which is so much like a brown and white lace umbrella it even has a runner, it tinkles out a breezy melody and drops green spores. She stops dead and cocks her head. She senses there's a moment asking to be born here that will pull her through a portal, blind her with its hospital lights, slap her to get her breathing. She picks the mushroom. She turns it in her hands, looking so interest -- like this is true appraisal, like the curiosity will take her past tomorrow -- that I know things will be all right, that she won't have to see that look on our mother's face. But she decides it's probably poison.

I'm yelling at her over the years through fungal tissue -- Look closer! Hear me! -- but she's not accepting messages from this day and age. She throws the mushroom against the side of the neighbor's house, and it reports a satisfying thwack. The next time she'll notice this species, she'll be in her thirties, with scars she doesn't try to hide anymore when she proffers a mushroom for another to inspect. She'll pick it from an Augustine grass island in the parking lot at the beach, and a man with a Weedwacker will tell her not to eat that fairy ring mushroom; it's poison."

"Do you like yourself?" my mother asked once. "It doesn't seem like you do." I answered yes, though later, in my room, I turned the question over in my head until I cried.

The right question, which neither of us could have known at the time, was, "Where did you go?"

Now, on the verge of leaving my thirties, the correct questions have become, "By whose clock are you living your life?" And, "What are you and all the organisms that hold you together doing to be worthy of your freedom, to practice it every day? To know that your movements are your own?"

At the end of our conversation, I ask Araújo what species of entomopathogenic fungi, besides scale insect parasites and Cordyceps militaris, I might expect to find this far north in Vermont, which is where I am while we talk through Zoom. He tells me that Gibellula can be found here on the underside of leaves. "So just turn thousands of leaves, and you will find them."

Just keep turning leaf after leaf after leaf."

In the second sentence of the book that the film is adapted from, it is explained that the protagonist's name, Melanie, means "'the black girl' from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair, so she thinks maybe it's not a good name for her." She would rather be called Pandora. I wonder why the filmmakers decided to cast Sennia Nanua, who's Black, in the role. In an interview, the young actress said that though she had auditioned several times for the part, the description of the character in the book made her think that she didn't have a chance.

In the book, Melanie observes her classmates seizing the opportunity to ask about their origins, which they don't really know, when their favorite teacher is in a particularly open mood. Of her classmates (and also herself), she says, "The one thing they never learn about, really, is themselves." I like to think the filmmakers simply couldn't let that line be said by a little white girl.

One movie poster shows Melanie's character looming over a ruined post-apocalyptic landscape with a muzzle over her bloody face (she has just eaten a cat). The muzzle is reminiscent of ones enslaved Africans would be made to wear as punishment so that they couldn't eat. The first portrayal of a zombie in the West must specify it's a twist on the Haitian myth with the title White Zombie (1932). Decades later, director George Romero invented the modern zombie genre with 1968's Night of the Living Dead. Romero originally assumed the lead -- Ben, the most competent of the zombie slayers -- would be white. When Black actor Duane Jones auditioned, however, it was clear he was the right choice.

Perhaps these casting moves indicate that when a zombie story is thoughtfully told, it is also inextricable from the Black uncanny."

These imaginary boundaries between human and animal worlds is untenable given the disastrous effects of human activity on the environment, but they also limit us imaginatively. Making is not only human; we are part of a much larger mess of organisms that are, right now, making and unmaking forms, materials and worlds. Our connection to these worlds is not just because we share the same space or materials, it is because to be alive is to make, to form environments that in turn form ourselves.

(1)Although this book focuses on human uses of spider silk, there are other animals that collect and use spider silk for their own constructions. The long-tailed tit builds its nest from a combination of spider webs, moss and twigs. Because of the elasticity of spider silk, the bird's nest will expand as its young hatch and grow. Some species of hummingbird use dry threads of spider silk to lash together twigs for their nest, and even tie down pebbles as weights to stop the nest from tipping."

Mycophilia helped me unlearn a tendency to vivisect and standardize that informed not only my idea of my place within (or outside) the ecosystem, but also my conception of how to inhabit my own Blackness. Before mushrooms, Blackness used to be so much less expansive because i allowed it to be defined for me by others, like cops, amidst concrete. The tools I was using to view my Blackness were of European manufacture, bequeathed by white supremacist schooling that so many of us must work to counteract. That race was socially constructed in these circumstances, but nonetheless informs the cultures one comes up in and the traditions one is pressured or allowed to claim or refuse, of course complicates matters. Amid these tensions, my Jamaicain-ness used to be distinct from my Caribbeanness somehow, which was distinct from my North Americanness, my whole self further segmented by being twice diasporic.

Some will disagree that I am anything but a United Statesian, given how young i was when I migrated here; others might suggest the extent to which I represent my Jamaicanness or even West Africanness to outgroups is the true measure of who I am. But the pursuit of fungi has me reconstructing my conception of the "self" from scratch - with pantry ingredients that spring back to life with rehydration, along with novel staples. What it means to be Black has taken a surprisingly central place in my rebuilding, surprising because it wouldn't have occurred to me to lug into the woods the socially constructed version of myself. But my Jamaicanness is made of fresh-picked food; of making the best of the ingredients available; of gloating with loved ones about how good it is despite its humble ingredients; of knowing how to work the land you live with; of reciprocal relationship with that land. It's church on Sunday, and whereas my cathedral is now usually a canopy of trees, it's as strong as the community that we're building there, which has been growing hunt by hunt, genuflection by genuflection. It's in all things pointing back home, from the chicken-of-the-woods patties, to hen-of-the-woods jerked jerky, to "saltfish" made from fishy salt-cured Hygrophorus flavodiscus. It might be curried venison, jerked wild turkey, or brown stew squirrel. Sorrel made with sumac and wild ginger. Solomon Gundy from fresh fish caught off the Massachusetts coast. Drumskins from amadou. The list goes on. A child of the diaspora, I recognize that every "new" thing is made from ingredients gathered before. I insist that my identity did not spring from a colonizer's head.

The study of mushrooms has given me back some of my ghosts. If most ghosts are gauzy apparitions, mine are slightly more vivid now, somehow. I can see the connections straining to make themselves to me. Some have said that whatever happened before colonizers came is of no comfort, and that feels right to me - with the proviso that whatever happened before is a wind I will happily feel at my back, once the ghosts there are speaking a language I can understand.

Histories of migration, questions of who brought what where, did not come fully alive for me until i found the sticky web of ancient, ever-present mycelium. They can chop down family trees, even hang us from them, but the mycelium keeps spreading under our feet."

[...]

Later, in autumn, that Polish friend of mine who had grown up hunting mushrooms and acted as my foraging mentor had a dinner party and sent her guests home with a peculiar favor - a paper shopping bag filled with as many hen-of-the-woods mushrooms as they cared to schlep away. Under her tutelage, I'd picked, cooked, and enjoyed the sculptural fruit bodies before. But it wasn't until that evening, during a wine-drenched moment when I stole away to really look at the dozens of large mushrooms she'd lined up on a bench near her back door, that I realized Grifola frondosa was more than inspiration to get creative in the kitchen. I picked one up. it was the heftiest I'd ever held, weighing at least fifteen pounds. I looked closely at the patterned, leaf-like caps that give the fruits their descriptive Latin name, flipped it over and put my nose right up against the white fertile surface with its many pores, like the inside of a bone. This chitinous mass was actually stunning; the way the silvers and creams shaded into the brown zones of the pileus mesmerized me. I thought about the way their flesh squeaked upon being harvested with a knife. A deep quaff brought me vaguely dirty animal aroma that translated to such rich umami when they were sauteed in cast iron. I searched for and found some of the fungus' tenants - an orange-striped salamander coexisting with a jumping spider on the mushroom's interior terraces. I thought about how the oaks they skirted were usually girthy elders and how the fact that this particular fungus grew there could offer clues about the land from which it emerged. If my usual move at parties had always been to find the dog or cat with which to splay out on the floor, I had now outdone myself by finding the mushrooms at which to coo, with which to cuddle. That night, G. frondosa had come int focus as something more than food, had become an organism: a mycelium, that being doing humble but essential work and making beautiful art in its spare time, a dramatics of survival in multiple acts. The fungus was using its scent and its taste of earth and its beauty and its heft and its eerie polyphonous voice to speak questions directly into my spirit. And my answer in that moment, because it was high time I immersed myself in a nonhuman language to the extent that i could, was, "Yes, just let me get my hiking boots."

With winter looming, I joined every online fungal forum watching with satisfaction as posts from my past life were replaced on my newsfeed by fungus identification requests in fora I'd lately joined. I bought very book. The queendom I'd begun acquainting myself with was endlessly fascinating, omnipresent, all-important ... yet relatively little was known about it. On days when I didn't have to walk dogs, I was out on the trails near my home, determined to tread all of the 250-plus miles of them, the thousands of acres of readily accessible from my front door. I was gone sometimes from sunup to sundown, my health app logging 30,000 steps between 8am and 7pm.

Under the canopy there was no phone signal. The mushrooms hid when you first walked by, the photogenic troops periscoping from pulpy, broken wood on the side of the log that came into view only on the return. Day after day, I got on my knees to take photos of their textures and colors. I chewed and spat their flesh, the residue of their identities on my tongue. Learning each new species helped terraform and fertilize what had been razed in my heart's landscape. I was learning that if losing one's self in other people could mean sudden enclosure, a shutting out, a hastily scrawled "no trespassing" sign, then losing oneself in a mysterious, capacious, and ever-expanding science might mean the opposite: no gate could shut to keep me away from the world fungi opened up.

[...]

Here was a different kind of love to feel, perhaps the closest I'll ever get to the agape variety that was supposed to animate me in church growing up. Meanwhile, the partner I lived with couldn't forgive me for disappearing in a clouse of spores. I don't blame himl; not only had I stopped cowriting the fiction of my domesticability, but I was once again going feral, turning him to a mushroom widower, inchworms vibrant in my hair, psilocybin reminding me that the day is plastic. One day in the woods, I told Anansi t hat I was going home. In response, I saw him take down his old web by the light of the sinking sun and set to work building a new one. "Who I am" spoke to me clearly in that moment., It was time for dismantling. I made a New Year's exit from that past life, but in many ways, I'd been going for ages."

As of this writing, huge strides toward an ecologically sound understanding of our planet are being made by using a fungal lens. The North American Mycoflora Project, which turned into the Fungal Diversity Survey (FunDiS), is mounting a heroic effort to encourage citizen scientists in their documentation of the rich fungal biome we live with every day. The scientists behind SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks), an international effort to map our mycelial networks by taking thousands of richly myceliated soil samples from around the world, began work in 2022. Popular participation in science is enjoying a nineteenth-century-style uptick: via online applications like iNaturalist and Mushroom Observer, crowdsourcing is expanding the mycological record. At the same time, those who've thought of themselves as the center of humanity are being forced to admit that the margins (and those they sought, and seek, to bury underground there) are where the keys to our continued existence can be found. Reckonings abound as our planet continually tips toward apocalypse. And as this dark renaissance takes root, I've begun using a fungal lens to bring my own mental and ancestral underground into focus. The essays here are a record of that exploration. As I sought a path to a more integrated sense of my past and the future, I found there's nothing lime the study of fungi to encourage ecological thinking and explore notions of discrete individuals, lone actors, and single-stream histories."