Does Gradle run multiple tests in parallel in the same process?

I tried sifting through Gradle on Github but the answer was not clear.

Say I have the following configuration:

tasks.withType(Test) {
    maxParallelForks = 8
}

And I have 2,000 tests to run. Does a single fork run multiple tests in parallel within its own process? Basically would a static variable need to be thread-safe when running tests.