Gay couple faces barriers to building a family

Ty Tonander met the tiny girl called Sophie in a crowded orphanage in Ukraine.

A database made the match. He was 27. She was 2 and "troublesome," orphanage workers said.

Her new adoptive father saw a bubbling curiosity instead. "I remember her walking up to a tree and touching the bark -- like she had never seen a tree before."

Adoption opened a new world for him, too. He wanted so much to be a parent. But as a gay man, he feared the experience might be out of reach.

Sophie is 8 now and lives with her two dads, Tonander and Mike Bisping, partners for 15 years. She is a third-grader with friends and homework who plays baseball, soccer and basketball. This year, life in the family's tidy, two-story household in Minneapolis got even livelier. Sophie got a sister. She and her dads made a long trip to Guatemala to welcome 2-year-old Ava to the family.

A sock-footed Ava ceases moving at high speed across the living room to point a finger at Bisping and introduce him as "Daddy." She lets out a giggle, then shifts her hand and her big brown eyes toward Tonander, who she calls "Papa." It's a scene that, a decade ago, her dads only dared to imagine.

Gays at CNU seek protection in official policy - The Board of Visitors tells protesters it will vote on a non-discrimination proposal in February

NEWPORT NEWS -- Christopher Newport University freshmen Cara Jackson and Aiden Grennell say they want to be treated like other students on campus, but they feel excluded because they are gay.

So on Friday, the two joined about 150 other CNU students in the lobby of the David Student Union who sat with electrical tape covering their mouths and held signs to tell Board of Visitors members and university officials that CNU policy should protect homosexual students and employees from discrimination.

Board members watched, listened and agreed that after nearly three years of delay they would decide in February on whether to change the policy.

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force recognizing Fla. man

Through Bob Cole's eyes we can see a half-century of change in gay South Florida:

As a frightened Miami Beach teen in the 1950s, reading in The Miami Herald about ''perverts'' hauled away from bars in police raids.

''It was a terrible period,'' said Cole, now 63 and an honoree at tonight's 10th annual National Gay and Lesbian Task Force recognition dinner. (An added twist -- Cole's humanitarian award is sponsored by The Miami Herald.)

As a student at the University of Florida in the early '60s, just after a McCarthy-era witch hunt by state Sen. Charley Johns to root out homosexual professors and students on campus.

The gay social scene in Coconut Grove during the early '70s, followed by Anita Bryant's successful 1977 campaign to repeal Miami-Dade County's gay-rights law.