Wait. So the Kenya Wedding That Got Everyone Arrested Wasn’t Even Real?

Oh, British Broadcasting Corporation. Why do you continue to step it in every time you try to generate reader interest in a gay story? If it’s not letting your audience vote on whether Uganda should execute homosexuals, you’re putting quotation marks around “gay,” as if to say the two men who supposedly tried to wed in Kenya (before police shut things down) are fauxmosexuals. Except they aren’t fake anything — besides, it appears, a fake story.

As the copy from the article shows (as LGBT Asylum News points out) the BBC likely meant to imply their wedding was what’s fake. Because the BBC placed the term “gay wedding” in quotation marks.

But weddings — ceremonies to honor the unions between two people — are not fake, or faux, or false. The weddings are, in fact, very real things; only the “marriages” might be considered fake, for they are not recognized by the government.

But maybe this entire story is moot, because there was no gay wedding (or is that “gay wedding”?) to begin with.

Chopping through the headlines and speculation, one report says the “gay wedding” — news of which sparked the riots and protests in Mombasa, and led to the arrests of five gay men — was never actually going to take place, because it was a joke started, as these things so often do, in a hair salon.