LOS ANGELES (AP) – The county’s 11 bathhouses will now be charged $1,008 a year for quarterly health inspections and a health permit.

The Board of Supervisors voted 3-0 on a new ordinance Jan. 10 that classifies the bathhouses as “commercial sex venues” and will charge a fee for the health inspections and permit.

Commercial sex venues are defined as “any establishment that charges patrons or members a fee for admission or membership and which as one of its primary purposes allows, facilitates and/or provides facilities for its patrons or members to engage in any high-risk sexual contact while on the premises.”

Supervisors approved an ordinance in September 2004 requiring commercial sex venues to follow health regulations and obtain health permits. By establishing a fee, the Department of Health Services can inspect facilities and issue permits.

“If successful, the project will reduce the spread of HIV and other [sexually transmitted diseases] by reducing high-risk behavior within commercial sex venues,” county health director Dr. Thomas Garthwaite wrote in a memorandum to supervisors.

In November, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation criticized the county for failing to enforce health regulations at bathhouses despite research showing cases of HIV infection were significantly higher at the facilities.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Sony Music has teamed with the founder of a GLBT cable network to form a record label geared toward developing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender recording artists.

The label, dubbed Music with a Twist, plans to employ talent scouts nationwide to find emerging artists who have generated a buzz in the GLBT community and have the potential for mass appeal.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The recordings will be released in a marketing partnership with the Sony Music Label Group, which includes Columbia Records Group, Epic Records, Sony Nashville and Sony Urban Music.

“It’s a home that says to artists, ‘We not only are OK with who you are, but we embrace that as part of your identity,’” said Matt Farber, president of Wilderness Media & Entertainment and founder of Logo, the MTV Networks channel targeting GLBT audiences.

Farber compared the concept of a record label focusing on GLBT artists to that of urban labels formed to nurture rap or hip-hop acts.

Twist plans to sign artists covering a variety of musical genres and also release compilations with songs by established artists.

Sony Music has also agreed to become a charter sponsor of a syndicated radio show, dubbed “Twist,” produced by Wilderness Media. The show is launching in several markets and online.

CLEVELAND, Ga. (AP) – A north Georgia high school student who fought to start a Gay-Straight Alliance club at her school is being honored by a GLBT magazine as its person of the year.

The Advocate selected Kerry Pacer, a senior at White County High School, as its person of the year. Past recipients of the title include artist Robert Mapplethorpe and Episcopal Church bishop Gene Robinson.

“It’s overwhelming,” Pacer said.

Among those who received honorable mention from the magazine in the recent issue were singer Melissa Etheridge and basketball player Sheryl Swoopes.

While Pacer said she feels honored, she also said she is uneasy with the media attention she has received.

A storm of controversy erupted last February when Pacer and her friends tried to form a Gay-Straight Alliance club for GLBT classmates and supportive students. The school board agreed to allow the students to start the club, but later school administrators recommended eliminating all non-curricular clubs at the school.

While the club – now called PRIDE or Peers Rising in Diversity Education – has been kicked out of the school, it still meets off school grounds. While other student clubs have civic or religious organizations as off-campus sponsors, no established group has come forward for Pacer’s club.

But Pacer said some volunteers have come forward to help the club.

Maine Won’t Discriminate, the group that successfully derailed an attempt to repeal the state’s gay rights law, spent a total of $1.1 million for its campaign, according to filings with the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices.

That was nearly three times what the Maine Grassroots Coalition and the Coalition for Marriage, a political arm of the Christian Civic League of Maine, spent on their campaigns to repeal the law. Combined, they spent just short of $412,000, according to spending documents filed with the state.

Mainers in November voted 55-45 percent against repealing the law, which makes discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal in employment, housing, credit, public accommodations and education.

Paul Madore of the Maine Grassroots Coalition said that supporters of the repeal effort were simply outspent, especially in getting out the vote.

“All of these things add up to votes, and in the end we had to realize they had more marbles than us,” said Madore.

Gay rights supporters far outspent opponents in the final days of the campaign, according to finance reports.

Maine Won’t Discriminate raised about $200,000 and spent more than $300,000 between Oct. 28 and Dec. 13. That final push included an extensive television advertising buy and phone-banking operation designed to mobilize voters, according to Patricia Peard, the group’s treasurer.

Madore said his group is now preparing for a fight over same-sex marriage.

“It will come as sure as night follows day,” Madore said, predicting a push for same-sex unions in the near future.

Gay rights advocates have dismissed any imminent plans to pursue such unions.

NEW YORK (AP) – Former President Bill Clinton announced that his foundation has negotiated agreements to lower the price of HIV tests and anti-AIDS drugs in the developing world.

Under the agreement, four companies will offer the tests for 49 cents to 65 cents apiece, slicing the cost of a diagnosis in half. Four more companies will provide the antiretroviral drugs efavirenz and abacavir at a price about 30 percent less than the current market rate.

“Too many people die because they can’t afford or don’t have access to the drugs,” Clinton said at his New York office. “This agreement will save hundreds of thousands of lives.”

The products and prices will be available to the Clinton Foundation’s procurement consortium, which includes 50 developing countries on several continents.

The Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, founded in 2002, provides technical, logistical and financial assistance to poorer countries struggling with the epidemic.

NEW YORK (AP) – Tory Dent, a poet and critic whose searing poems about living with AIDS won several awards, has died. She was 47.

Dent died Dec. 30 at her Manhattan home of an opportunistic infection associated with AIDS, said her husband, Sean Harvey.

Since she was diagnosed as HIV positive at age 30, Dent published three books of poetry, What Silence Equals (Persea Books) in 1993, HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow Press) in 2000 and Black Milk (Sheep Meadow Press), which came out in 2005, just weeks before her death.

HIV, Mon Amour won several awards, including the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. It contained unflinching accounts of her daily existence battling AIDS.

“Tory’s work was especially important because so few people who are suffering physically as much as she was are able to communicate with the outside world the way she did,” Harvey said. “She had sort of a preternatural drive to communicate the extent of her physical suffering.”

The poet Adrienne Rich, a friend, said that in Black Milk, Dent was dealing with “all kinds of not only opportunistic infections but experimental treatments with sometimes devastating side effects.”

“It’s as though she was able to convert her rage to live under this verdict of HIV into an art that was actually equal to it,” Rich said.

Her editor at Sheep Meadow Press, Stanley Moss, said, “She was a great poet with or without AIDS.”

She was born Victorine Dent in Wilmington, Del., and graduated from Barnard College in New York City in 1981. She received a master’s degree in creative writing at New York University and wrote essays and criticism for art journals as well as catalog commentaries for art exhibitions.

In addition to her husband, Dent is survived by a brother, Stephen Dent of Riverside, Conn., and a sister, Melissa Dent of Manhattan.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – A Baptist minister who has spoken out against homosexuality was charged last week with propositioning an undercover male police officer.

The Rev. Lonnie Latham, 60, was charged with a single misdemeanor count of offering to engage in an act of lewdness. If convicted, he faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500.

Latham was released from jail on $500 bond on Jan. 4, the day after his arrest. As he was leaving jail he said: “I was set up. I was in the area pastoring to police.”

Latham has resigned as senior pastor of South Tulsa Baptist Church. He has also stepped down from the board of directors of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma and the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The American Civil Liberties Union said Latham never should have been arrested.

“Rev. Latham appears to have done nothing more than to invite someone to a hotel with him for consensual sex. That’s not a crime,” said Joann Bell, executive director of the ACLU of Oklahoma Foundation.

Latham’s attorney, Mack Martin, said his client will plead innocent.