He wed ‘tall white man from Tennessee’
HE romanced Lady Gabriella Windsor for three years but Aatish Taseer is now happily married to a man, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The 36-year-old writer married lawyer Ryan Davis, 32, – who Taseer calls ‘my tall white man from Tennessee’ – in August 2015.
The couple live in a £1.2 million flat in Manhattan’s Upper West Side with their dog Zinc, and Taseer has become an outspoken gay rights advocate.
In an article for Travel + Leisure magazine a year after their wedding, Taseer wrote about taking a road trip with his new husband across the American South, which traditionally voted against legalising same-sex marriages. Gay marriage became legal across America in 2015 after a historic vote by the US Supreme Court.
Taseer wrote of his nerves at meeting Ryan’s mother: ‘Like many Southerners, Mrs Davis had not totally adjusted to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold our right to marry.’
He added the pair had ‘doused our nerves in white wine’ over lunch.
The author’s Instagram page is full of pictures of the pair, who share a love of fine food and travel. There are numerous shots of their wedding day on August 8, 2015, which was attended by The Satanic Verses novelist Salman Rushdie.
In 2016 Taseer – who is half Indian and half Pakistani, an also a British passport holder – wrote of his pride at obtaining a green card, the first step towards US citizenship.
‘Married to an American, I was entering [the US] for the first time as a permanent resident,’ he said. ‘I was overcome by what must be one of the most unfashionable emotions of our time; boundless, unqualified love for America.’
In the article for the Wall Street Journal, he spoke about experiencing racism in the UK, where he was born in 1980: ‘The racism that I experienced in Britain was insidious and casual. It was not part of a society coming to terms with a difficult racial history; it was a society telling you in the clearest terms that you would never belong.’
He has also written extensively about gay rights and is an advocate of legalising gay marriage in India and Pakistan, where it is still illegal for same-sex couples to wed.
‘We doused our nerves in white wine at lunch’