BY BMJ MURIITHI
ANN ARBOR, MISSOURI Sunday – A Kenyan man has tied the knot with another man in Missouri, USA. Ben Gitau, who hails from Nakuru, got married to Steve Damelin at a ceremony held at Ann Arbor, MI, on Saturday afternoon.
Soon after the event, the two were seen at the Square’s gardens kissing and fondling in public as friends and family members who had accompanied them cheered.
Mr Kararu Ririi, a close friend to the couple and a self confessed gay Kenyan residing in California, tweeted the following on Saturday shortly after attending the wedding:
“This afternoon I had a chance to congratulate my friend, Ben and his husband, Steve on occasion of their marriage. It is a rare thing to see a Kenyan man so courageous! Congratulations.”
Gitau lived in Atlanta, Georgia, before moving to the state of California.
Same-sex-marriage was legalized in the State of Missouri in June last year in a landmark US Supreme court ruling which struck down states’ bans on gay or lesbian marriages between two people “as long as they love each other.”
According to a family member who spoke to the Nation on condition of anonymity, Gitau met his ‘fiancé,’ in Atlanta where the latter was a PHD student at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Soon after taking the vows Saturday, Gitau posted the following multiple hashtags – some of which are very popular within the gay community in the US – on his twitter and Facebook accounts:
#HappilyMarried #NewlyWed #GayCouple #GayHusbands #2Hubbies#Blessed #JewishHubby #ChristianHubby#Hubby1 #Hubby2 #4Ever1#InGodsMath #GetItRight #NoWife #ThankYou!
Mr Damlin is a well-known American scholar and professor of Mathematics whose Masters and PhD thesis were on “Approximation for Erdos Weights”.
His contributions include the Cambridge University Press book The Mathematics of Signal Processing with Willard Miller and he has made contributions in diverse areas including number theory, finite fields, coding theory, computer vision, imaging, signal processing, quantum computing, computational and pure harmonic analysis, geometric analysis, random matrices, potential theory, approximation theory, numerical analysis and mathematics education.
His collaborators include Alfred Hero, R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering (University of Michigan) and 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society award recipient and Fefferman.
He has been a member of the American Mathematical Society Mathematics Research Communities Advisory Board and the American Mathematical Society Committee of Committees. In 2005–2006, he held a New Directions Research Professor at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, University of Minnesota and in 2010–2011 was the principle awardee in High Performance Computing (CHPC) at the University of the Witwatersrand.
We couldn’t immediately establish what Ben Gitau currently does for a living.
http://ksnmedia.com/2016/05/multiple-photos-gay-kenyan-man-gets-married-american-man/