Mary Rungo
This week, To Be Human visits a store in Mississippi where we meet Mary Rungo, who shared a story about her family’s warm (and humorous) response to her coming out at 19.
Store # 18567
D’Iberville, Mississippi
Mary Rungo, her husband, Danny, and her friends frequently come to Starbucks to write, draw and do “nerdy things.”
“Today, you happen to walk in on D&D planning, which is Dungeons and Dragons, a tabletop role-playing game. If you’ve watched any bit of Stranger Things, it’s the game they’re playing in the beginning with the Demogorgon. We came here to plan. I’m a DM, which is a dungeon master. I run the game, I do a lot of world building, I create a bunch of characters and I try to guide my friends and my husband who are playing with me through the story I’ve created and not let them get themselves killed, despite their best efforts. So basically DMs just try to herd cats through an obstacle course of very carefully crafted storyline.”
She met her husband Danny, who is transgender, on her first day of college in a psychology class in early 2016.
“I was like, ‘Oh, you’re cute. I like your jacket.’ And then we hit it off,” Mary said.
Mary came out to her family when she was 19 as bisexual and gender fluid or, as she describes it, sometimes she feels like a girl and sometimes “my entire gender is just like that shifty hand motion.”
“My family was pretty great about it,” she said. “I don’t think he really understood bisexual, but that Christmas, my dad got me this little, like, nightgown t-shirt that said, ‘No Boyfriend, No Problem,’ and to this day, it’s the best gay joke he’s ever made.”
– Jennifer Warnick
“I don’t think he really understood bisexual, but that Christmas, my dad got me this little, like, nightgown t-shirt that said, ‘No Boyfriend, No Problem,’ and to this day, it’s the best gay joke he’s ever made.”
