LITTLE ROCK (AP) – In a bid for more national exposure, the Arkansas owners of the Miss Gay America Pageant have sold the franchise to a Mississippi company.

The annual pageant has been headquartered in Little Rock for more than three decades. Organizers describe it as the largest and most prestigious female impersonator competition in the nation.

Former owner Norman Jones sold the pageant, its copyright and a smaller circuit of competitions on Feb. 4 to L&T Entertainment, a firm in Nesbit, Miss., about 20 miles south of Memphis.

Jones won the pageant in 1973 as Norma Kristie and afterward started running it out of a Little Rock nightclub that he also owns, but now he says he’s ready to move on.

“I’ve been doing this for 33 years,” Kristie said. “It’s time for me to concentrate on something else.”

The pageant draws 350 impersonators to pageants across the country to compete for the chance to come to Little Rock. Contestants are scored based on evening gown, creative costume, talent and interview. The winner receives $6,000 in prize money and an estimated $35,000 in earnings from guaranteed booked performances after the coronation.

Terry Eason, co-owner of L&T Entertainment, said he is looking at a couple of different cities for the next October competition.

“There were many people who felt that the pageant had reached a point of stagnation,” Eason said. “It wasn’t growing and it’s time to move it around.”

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) – Some professors want military recruiters banned at the University of California, Santa Barbara, because of the prohibition against gays, lesbians and bisexuals serving openly in the armed forces.

Thomas Scheff, a sociology professor emeritus, and 16 other professors emailed two proposed resolutions for consideration at an Academic Senate meeting late last month – one to have the ROTC program reviewed and the second calling for a ban on military recruiters at the school. Although discrimination against gays, lesbians and bisexuals was the impetus, Scheff said the motive for some of those who signed is a deeper political opposition to the war in Iraq.

UCSB has had a long anti-war tradition. During the Vietnam War, the ROTC offices were burned during protests.

More than 60 undergraduates are in the ROTC program, receiving scholarships in exchange for military service when they graduate, said Lt. Col. John Simpson, chair of UCSB’s military science program. More than 100 students take part in the various history, law and physical training classes offered by the department.

Academic Senate chair Henry Yeun, an engineering professor, said the resolution on barring recruiters was moved into a committee while a the resolution calling for a review of the military science department will move forward.

If the Senate approves a resolution, it would be considered advisory and would be forwarded to Chancellor Henry Yang. It would then be up to him to forward the recommendation to the UC president.

System-wide, the University of California has a policy of not discriminating against organizations attempting to recruit students for employment.

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – A lesbian who split with her partner after adopting the woman’s biological children must pay child support, the Indiana Court of Appeals has ruled.

The woman adopted her partner’s children in 1997. A few years after their breakup, she tried to vacate the adoption. Around the same time, the children’s biological mother, who had remarried and divorced a man, filed for child support.

A three-judge panel ruled that the woman who adopted the children must contribute to the cost of raising them.

“Whether a parent is a man or a woman, homosexual or heterosexual, or adoptive or biological, in assuming that role, a person also assumes certain responsibilities, obligations, and duties,” Judge John G. Baker wrote in a 22-page ruling.

“That person may not simply choose to shed the parental mantle because it becomes inconvenient, seems ill-advised in retrospect, or becomes burdensome because of a deterioration in the relationship with the children’s other parent,” the decision said.

The ruling is part of a growing and sometimes contradictory body of family law grappling with same-sex relationships.

The appeals court ruled in November that a person may adopt the children of a same-sex partner and retain parental rights, such as visitation privileges, following a breakup. Yet last month, the court found that state law defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Ellen Andersen, a professor at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis who follows gay rights issues, said there is tension between the court’s rulings.

“The law is progressing, and – as happens a lot – as laws are reacting to social movement changes, there’s a lot of one-step forward, two-step backing,” she said.

SUMMIT, Ky. (AP) – A student and two sets of parents are suing the Boyd County Education, contending that anti-harassment training forces students to accept homosexuality.

The student, Timothy Allen Morrison II, his parents, Timothy and Mary Morrison, and two other parents, Brian Nolen and Debora Jones, are represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based legal foundation that takes on religious rights cases.

The group claims the training violates their constitutional rights of free speech and religion.

Winter Huff, an attorney who represented the board in a previous lawsuit that led to the training, said in a written statement that nothing in the video training compels any particular belief.

The suit claims that the training and district harassment policies violate the students right to follow his religious beliefs because it prohibits him from telling gays and lesbians that those who engage in destructive lifestyles like homosexuality are wrong.

The training was part of the settlement of a lawsuit against the district by a now-defunct gay-rights group.

The suit follows a roughly three-year struggle between gay and straight students and their supporters who wanted to form a gay-straight alliance club, and a sizable number of students, parents and others in the district who opposed the club.

DURHAM, N.H. (AP) – A University of New Hampshire sophomore wants the school’s student senate to pass a resolution denouncing the federal government’s policy of excluding gay men as blood donors.

The resolution proposed by Nick Christensen would oppose the government and American Red Cross policy of not accepting any blood donations from any gay men because of the risk of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

But Michael Freedman, chief of business management for American Red Cross blood services in the New England region, says his group isn’t discriminating. He says it only is following the government’s policy, as all blood banks must.

Freedman also says the ban is a matter of science, which in the mid-1980s showed men who had sex with other men since 1977 are at higher risk for blood-born diseases. The guideline was upheld again in 2000.

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) – Former Sandoval County Clerk Victoria Dunlap, who fueled the nation’s marriage debate by issuing licenses to same-sex couples, is writing a book about her experiences.

The Republican clerk issued more than 60 same-sex marriage licenses on Feb. 20, 2004, before Attorney General Patricia Madrid filed a lawsuit that stopped her. The lawsuit was dismissed in January.

Dunlap, who lost the June primary for Sandoval County commissioner, has moved to Ohio where she is researching about 20 boxes of notes about her experiences in a basement office. Her term as clerk ended Jan. 1.

Dunlap – in a telephone interview from her Coshocton, Ohio, home about 70 miles east of Columbus – said she was right to issue same-sex marriage licenses and said she would do it again.

“I wouldn’t change anything,” Dunlap said. “I said I would be fair and impartial and that is what I did.”

Dunlap said it wasn’t until after she issued the licenses that she came to believe same-sex marriage is the “most important civil rights issue” of our time.

“We just did what was right. We did what was fair. We know what is right and I’m proud to have done that,” she said.

Dunlap, a mother of two, said she moved to Ohio to be near her husband’s family.

Madrid accused Dunlap of overstepping her authority by trying to interpret state marriage law.

After Madrid filed the lawsuit, Dunlap spent the last nine months of her term under a temporary restraining order barring her from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

She called Madrid’s actions illegal and said New Mexico’s courts were beyond repair.

“The judicial process is about as murky and corrupted as the executive branch of the government that I was in,” she said.