ANCHORAGE (AP) - Anchorage authorities say they’re investigating the cause of a fire that destroyed a gay pride float intended for a 4th of July parade. KTUU-TV reports that witnesses told investigators that moments before the fire began Friday morning they saw someone running from the driveway where the float was being constructed. Neighbors and the float’s builders say they fear a hate crime. Investigators say they’re still working. A report that concludes the fire was set would lead to a criminal investigation. The builders say they’ll still improvise a float using the ashes and charred pieces of the original.

MADISON (AP) - The Wisconsin Supreme Court has upheld the state’s constitutional ban on gay marriage and civil unions. In a 7-0 ruling, the court on Wednesday ruled that the 2006 constitutional amendment was properly put to voters in a statewide referendum.

The court rejected a lawsuit that claimed the amendment violated a rule that limits referendum questions to a single subject. The lawsuit, filed by a voter opposed to the amendment, argued that gay marriage and civil unions were two different subjects.

Justice Michael Gableman says both sentences “carry out the same general purpose of preserving the legal status of marriage in Wisconsin as between only one man and one woman.”

NEW YORK (AP) - A man was convicted Monday of murder as a hate crime during his retrial on charges that he beat an Ecuadorean immigrant with an aluminum baseball bat after mistaking him and his brother for a gay couple. Jurors deliberated for about seven hours before convicting Keith Phoenix in the death of Jose Sucuzhanay. He also was convicted of attempted assault as a hate crime in the attack on Romel Sucuzhanay.

The trial started about six weeks after the mistrial was declared on May 11 when a juror refused to deliberate. The brothers were walking home from a bar after a party at a Brooklyn church on Dec. 7, 2008. Romel Sucuzhanay had put his coat around his brother to keep him warm and was helping him walk because he was drunk. Meanwhile, Hakim Scott, 26 and Phoenix, 30, also leaving a party, pulled up in a sport utility vehicle. They began yelling anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs, according to Assistant District Attorney Josh Hanshaft. Jose Sucuzhanay became upset and tried to kick the wheel of the SUV, and Scott got out and smashed the beer bottle on his head, then chased Romel Sucuzhanay down the block with it, according to trial testimony. Phoenix grabbed a bat from the back of the SUV and attacked Jose Sucuzhanay, cracking his skull with the bat, according to testimony. The two drove away in the SUV and were captured about 20 minutes later on surveillance footage crossing the Triborough Bridge - since renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge - into the Bronx. Prosecutors ended their closing arguments Monday by showing the footage of Phoenix on the bridge, smiling. Scott was convicted in May of manslaughter but acquitted of a more serious murder charge, and the jury found his actions were not a hate crime. He faces 25 years in prison and is awaiting sentencing. The two men were initially tried together with separate juries because they had implicated each other. Phoenix is facing 25 years to life in prison. His sentencing was set for Aug. 5. Both men will be sentenced by Judge Patricia DiMango. Phoenix’s attorney, Philip Smallman, had argued that the case was about a fight that escalated, not a premeditated attack. Smallman said Monday that it was Scott who started the fight, not Phoenix, and the evidence against his client, especially in the case of Romel, was weak.

“The bulk of the activity was attributed to the co-defendant,” he said. “My client wasn’t the first person out of the automobile. He didn’t start the fight.” Smallman said he would appeal. “The jury has spoken and that’s the beauty of the system that we have,” he said.

The victims’ brother said Phoenix showed no remorse. “I cannot understand how a person could kill another person and be laughing, enjoying 20 minutes later,” Diego Sucuzhanay told reporters after the two-week trial. “That kind of reaction - it can be seen only in a person that’s full of hate.” The attack came about a month after another Ecuadorean immigrant, Marcelo Lucero, was stabbed to death in Patchogue, on Long Island. Jeffrey Conroy, 19, was convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime in that case last month. Six other teens pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

KENTUCKY (AP) - At his Kentucky elementary school, kids taunted Brent on the playground about being gay, whatever that was. By eighth grade, he realized what they meant and came out to a friend - and vice versa. She was an avid writer, he a voracious reader. They headed to their school library in search of stories that spoke to their lives: gay, gay in the South, gay and fearing stereotypes like “disgusting” and “worthless.”

“There were tons of books about gangs and drugs and teen pregnancy and there were no LGBT books. I asked the librarian about it and she was like, ‘This is middle school. I can only have appropriate books here,’” said Brent, now 15 and heading into his sophomore year of senior high. So they went to their public library, where they discovered plenty of romantic gay steam between covers - for adults. “We weren’t complaining,” said Brent, who asked that his last name and hometown not be used. Turning next to bookstores, they finally found what they’d been looking for - a recent explosion in the publishing world of reads that speak to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning teens. First came a gem, a book for young people that made them cry: Martin Wilson’s 2008 debut, “What They Always Tell Us,” set in Tuscaloosa, Ala. The story about a troubled year for two brothers, one of whom finds solace in a relationship with a boy, made him feel less like an “alien on your own planet.” A world of books followed. Brent read his way through Tom Dolby, Robin Reardon, Julie Ann Peters and David Levithan. He soon realized there were lots of coming out stories but he also craved romance, fantasy and paranormal books with characters who just happened to be gay, like Damien in the “House of Night” vampire series he loves by the mother-daughter team P.C. and Kristin Cast. “I see the characters trickling into the mainstream genres. I really like that,” Brent said. “It makes being gay feel natural, which it is, of course. Books give you hope.” traveled light years since John Donovan’s “I’ll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip” led the way in 1969, now long out of print. The book on the confused world of 13-year-old Davy and the jock he kisses will be reissued in September from Flux, an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide. “This book made Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) very nervous,” said Brian Farrey, editor of the new edition. “They weren’t sure how people were going to take to it. It was the one that said it can be done for teens and there won’t be people with pitchforks and torches waiting for you at the door. It opened the closet to teens and said you are not alone.” Well before gay characters began popping up in the mainstream on TV and at the movies, librarians embraced “I’ll Get There,” said Kathleen T. Horning, director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Another important forerunner was Nancy Garden’s 1982 “Annie on My Mind” and its unabashedly happy ending for two 17-year-old girls who fall in love. “Previous to that, there would be some awful car accident or one of the gay characters would die,” Horning said, acknowledging that thread in “I’ll Get There.” “There was a sense that the gay character had to be punished somehow. They were kind of depressing.” Still, until now few LGBT titles became blockbusters. That changed with two boys named Will Grayson and a very large, very GLEE-ful linebacker named Tiny. “Will Grayson, Will Grayson,” by Levithan and John Green, debuted on the New York Times children’s best-seller list and stayed there for three weeks after its April release. It’s a first for a young adult novel with major gay themes and has delighted hungry teen readers - fanboys and fangirls who were the likely reason the book became a trending topic on Twitter. Penguin has 60,000 copies in print. In alternating chapters, Green and Levithan write of two 16-year-old boys with little in common, living in separate Chicago suburbs. One’s depressed and struggling to come out and the other is straight with a flamboyantly gay friend in Tiny Cooper, a football star on the hunt for love - and stardom in musical theater. “I AM tiny,” said 20-year-old Andrew Casasanta, an English major at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “It’s still very frustrating. I don’t think that there’s many characters out there that I can personally relate to and they’re generally more stereotypes. It’s important that this book, while having gay themes front and center, was written well.” It helps that Levithan is a prolific rock star in gay lit for young people with an acclaimed winner in 2003, “Boy Meets Boy.” It also helps that Green is revered as a writer for teens, including his “Paper Towns” in 2008, and by fans of the adrenaline-infused videos he posts regularly online. “Landing as high on the New York Times list as we did with `Will Grayson, Will Grayson’ made a big statement to the children’s publishing world that gay characters are not a commercial liability,” Green said. “This is an important statement to make.” As gay-straight alliances spread in schools and kids reared by gay parents have kids of their own, books remain important survival tools for all young people trying to figure out who they are, said Lynn Evarts, a high school librarian in the farm country of Sauk Prairie, Wis. “Kids have for the most part become ‘Will and Grace’-ified,” she said. “Oftentimes I’ll hand them a book that has a gay main character and tell them how funny it is, and they take it and like it. These are kids who wouldn’t normally touch anything like that. I live in the land of rednecks, but they like it because it’s funny and good.” Funny and good is well and good for kids with access to LGBT lit. What about readers like Brent who don’t have inclusive libraries, deep pockets or technology to download ebooks? Recent research in Texas, for instance, indicated a strong “I don’t serve those teens” attitude among librarians.

“It’s the argument that drives me crazy,” said Teri Lesesne, who teaches young adult lit in the Department of Library Science at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.

“It’s like, `Yeah, you do.’ They might not be coming in and saying, `Hi, I’m gay or I’m bi or I’m transgender or I’m questioning my own identity,’ because they’re afraid,” she said. “But they’re there and they’re looking for these books.”