Duel in the sun: a web designer goes head-to-head with a media giant over a site catering to gay tourists. (The Advocate Report).

There's a storm brewing over the placid desert community of Palm Springs, Calif., and it could be a doozy. Local gay Web designer Jerry Youngman is facing a showdown with media giant Gannett (owner of USA Today) over the name of Youngman's Web site The Dessert Sun, which recommends "places to get a good dessert" in the Palm Springs area and is funded via advertising targeting gays, particularly tourists.

In April, just over a month after the site's launch, Youngman received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers for The Desert Sun, a local newspaper since 1927 that is now one of hundreds of papers across the country owned by Gannett.

"Their complaint has no merit whatsoever," Youngman told The Advocate. "In this part of the country a lot of businesses use desert and sun in their names." According to Youngman, it's the gay-themed ads on his site--some of which link to sexually explicit sites--that Gannett objects to. "I spoke to the owner of DesertSun.com [a nongay advertising Web page unrelated to the region]. They've been operating for over a year and have never heard from [the newspaper's lawyers]," he says.

So far legal action has been only threatened, but Youngman says he's not backing down. Calls to attorney

Suzanne Underwald were unreturned, but in an April 29 letter to Youngman, Underwald called Dessert Sun "clearly a pretext to justify your attempt to trade off the goodwill of our client's mark."