An Injustice

At the end of my sophomore year at RIC Jess and I were looking to get an apartment. We both had to take summer classes that summer, and Jess lived too far away, and I had a toxic home environment that I wasn’t looking to or really able to go back to. In the process of looking for an apartment, we experienced injustice in a few ways. To start, we both had non-existent credit, as we were 18 turning 19 and as with most people from working class homes, had both grown up being told to avoid getting a credit card for as long as possible. As a result we each needed a co-signer in order to sign a lease. This in itself is an injustice against young people in our society, as you need to have credit in order to get anything, but also need credit to get credit.
But ultimately, this lead to the bigger issue in the situation, which was obtaining cosigners for our lease. Thankfully for me, my mother had just before this gotten her credit high enough to get a mortgage, and while her credit was still low, agreed to co-sign for me. Jess on the other hand had a harder time. Her parents’ credit was good, but they refused to co-sign a lease for us because they did not want to support us living together in a one bedroom apartment. We had been together for a year and half, which may have seemed too early to move in together, but the timing was not the issue, but rather that we are a queer couple. They told Jess that they would co-sign the lease if we got a two bedroom apartment instead of a one-bedroom, so that they wouldn’t have to think about what was going on behind closed doors. At the same time, they had just a couple of months prior allowed her brother and his girlfriend to live together in the same room in their own home. We financially couldn’t afford a two-bedroom apartment, and it also would not make sense for us to struggle financially for an extra room which would go unused. We asked my older sister and she was in the process of buying a house and couldn’t also cosign as her credit had been checked multiple times in the past few months, and she had a lot on her plate financially.
At this point we began to worry, we’d both already missed the deadline to live on campus the next year and had already registered for summer courses which we couldn’t take during the year. We also both had jobs lined up in Providence and Jess had turned away her previous summer job in her hometown. While neither of our parents would have turned us away had we needed to move in at home individually, our lives wouldn’t work that way. We were running out of time and options, our extended families were either also not comfortable with our relationship, or we were not close enough with them to ask them to cosign. We were terrified we weren’t going to have a place to go, and end up among the high rate of homeless LGBTQ people. Thankfully when we had no other option, my sister secretly cosigned for us and the realtor company agreed to use a previous credit report and not run her credit score again. While it ultimately worked out for us in the end, it was a very close call and could have easily gone very wrong. Also, it brought about new sides of family members and created quite a bit of stress and heavy emotions.
We’ve both prepared ourselves now and worked to create credit for ourselves so that the next time we go to sign a lease we will be able to do so on our own, and won’t have to bring the topic back up. But also it’s more of an issue with the lack of support for our relationship. At the time while we both knew our families had issues with us being gay, they had not said anything other than small comments to express that. So while we may not need our families to cosign a lease again soon, it is worrisome of where else we may not be supported by either side of our families in the future, whether it’s getting married, moving somewhere new, starting a family, etc. I would like to think I would be more emotionally ready for it if it were to happen again, as it would not be as surprising and would not cause as much emotional distress. But I’m not sure if that’s true. Jess and I’s relationship has only grown over time, and so as time goes on, the idea of the lack of acceptance from either of our families in many ways just gets harder.