SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) – Lake Tahoe will host its first ski and activities festival this winter targeted toward gays and lesbians.

The weeklong event, billed as “Ascent: the Winter Party at Lake Tahoe,” will feature the Indigo Girls and Judy Shepard as the keynote speaker.

Shepard is the mother of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was murdered in October 1998 in Laramie, Wyo.

The event will run Feb. 27 through March 6.

The event is modeled after the Aspen Gay Ski Week, which attracts about 3,500 visitors to the Colorado town and pumps an estimated $12 million into the local economy.

Some of the proceeds from the event will be shared with seven charities, including the nonprofit foundation founded by Judy Shepard dedicated to educational efforts that embrace and accept diversity.

Other beneficiaries include the Sierra Foothill AIDS Foundation, Sierra Recovery Center, Tahoe Youth & Family Services, Tahoe Arts Project, The Point Foundation and the South Lake Tahoe Women’s Center.

DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) – A book read aloud to sixth-grade students at Bridgeview Elementary in Le Claire has been questioned by a parent because one of the main characters is gay.

The Misfits, by James Howe, is about four middle-school students in a small town in New York State. It focuses on their efforts to eliminate name-calling in their school.

Superintendent Jim Spelhaug said an eight-member review committee will make its recommendations to the school board.

“These type of issues come along every now and then, and it is important to follow the processes in place in a fair and deliberate manner,” Spelhaug said.

An unidentified parent checked boxes on a request form, indicating that he or she did not want the book assigned to his or her child and wanted its availability withdrawn from other students as well.

Howe, in an email interview with the Quad-City Times, said it was the first challenge to the book he had heard about.

He said he was inspired to write the book by his daughter, who was perceived as “different in some indefinable way” in the seventh grade.

“She was excluded and called names,” he said.

He said he also drew on his own experiences as a teenager.

“After coming out as a gay man after many years of struggling with feelings of shame and fear that resulted from a lifetime of internalizing the hatred and fear of others, I wanted to write a book that would make a difference for boys like me and girls like my daughter,” he said.

The book, published in 2001, led to a nationwide initiative to eliminate name-calling. The website www.nonamecallingweek.org has enlisted hundreds of schools in the effort.

LANSING, Mich. (AP) – Gov. Jennifer Granholm will remove same-sex partner benefits from contracts negotiated with state workers, said an aide, citing a voter-approved amendment to the Michigan Constitution that bans same-sex marriage “and similar unions.”

Michigan voters approved the amendment Nov. 2.

Granholm aide David Fink said that negotiated contracts scheduled for adoption by the state Civil Service Commission on Dec. 15 will be stripped of the same-sex domestic partner benefits.

Fink, who holds the title of state employer, said the Granholm administration decided to eliminate the benefits because of the passage of Proposal 2, which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman and bans same-sex marriage and “similar unions for any purpose.”

“We’re about following the law and honoring the intent of the voters,” Fink told the Detroit Free Press.

He said the benefits could be restored before the contracts take effect on Oct. 1, 2005 if the courts have resolved the issue by then.

Republican legislators have been pressing the Democratic governor to strip the same-sex benefits from the contracts.

UAW lobbyist Alan Kilar said that the union reached an agreement with the state in good faith and expected the state to stick with it.

“They agreed to this,” Kilar said. “It’s a contract and an agreement is an agreement.”

CLEVELAND (AP) – The liberal-leaning United Church of Christ launched a national TV advertising program but said the ads had been rejected at the last minute by CBS and NBC as too controversial.

The 30-second ad highlights the Cleveland-based UCC’s welcoming stance toward the GLBT community and anyone else who might feel shunned elsewhere.

The networks said the ad was too controversial to broadcast because it implied exclusion of same-sex couples by other groups, according to the UCC.

Messages seeking comment were left at the New York offices of both networks.

The ad was accepted by ABC Family, AMC, BET, Discovery and TBS, among others, the UCC said.

The UCC’s three-and-a-half-week, $1.7 million campaign meant to attract new members will be featured on cable and network TV and could be extended into 2005.

The ad shows a muscular bouncer, working a rope line outside a handsome but nameless church, deciding who is eligible to enter and worship.

“No, step aside, please,” he says to two men holding hands.

Across the screen comes the message, “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” The final scene shows two women embracing.

“We’re doing it because we made a discovery: there are lots of people out there who don’t know we exist,” said Ron Buford, who is coordinating the program for the 1.3 million-member denomination, down from 1.7 million in 1989. The UCC has 6,000 congregations.

PITTSBURGH (AP) – A man who botched the castration of a transgender woman will spend the next three years on probation.

“I have no intention of doing this again to animals or humans,” Douglas Lenhart, 49, told Allegheny County Judge John Zottola. “I’m completely out of this. Completely done.”

Zottola sentenced Lenhart to jail time he had already served and will let him serve his probation in Kansas City, Kan., where he now lives.

In July, Lenhart acknowledged trying to castrate Catherine Watson, 46, of McKeesport. Watson was born with nonfunctioning male genitals and has lived as a woman since age 9, Lenhart’s defense attorney James Wymard said.

Lenhart pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and practicing medicine without a license.

Lenhart had said Watson was “desperate” to find someone to perform the surgery and he thought he could do it because of his experience castrating animals on a farm.

(AP) – State Rep. John Graham Altman, R-Charleston, wants to cut South Carolina Educational Television’s $12.7 million budget after it aired a documentary on gays in the South. He said the show actively promoted homosexuality.

“We are your Neighbors” was part of a twice-monthly series about life in the South. The Southern Lens series also featured Sentencing the Victim, an award-winning documentary on the rights of crime victims.

The documentary “was just one 26-minute show out of 8,700 hours of programming,” SCETV President Maurice Bresnahan said.

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) – A state appeals court has upheld a woman’s adoption of her former lesbian partner’s biological daughter, a newspaper reported.

Attorneys for the child’s biological mother, Julie Hobbs, told The Galveston County Daily News that the ruling cited problems with the form of the appeal, not its merits, and that they would consider appealing the decision to the Texas Supreme Court.

Hobbs appealed the case, claiming the judge who heard it lacked jurisdiction to validate the adoption.

Family Court Judge Jan Yarbrough’s ruling upheld the parental rights of Kathleen Van Stavern, who is seeking joint custody of the child.

An associate judge ruled in September that the state family code requires adoptions to be challenged within six months. Yarbrough, who reviewed the case on appeal, upheld the earlier judge’s ruling.

Hobbs and Van Stavern were living together as a couple when Hobbs was artificially inseminated and gave birth in 1998. Three years later, Van Stavern successfully adopted the child.

The couple’s eight-year relationship ended in March and Van Stavern began paying child support and asked for joint custody.

Hobbs, however, claimed the adoption was void because the family code requires an adoptive parent to be a spouse of the biological parent. Texas does not recognize same-sex unions.