 Art gallery manager Bette Porter and social worker Tina Kennard have been a couple for seven years and want to start a family. Their next-door neighbor, Tim Haspel, who works as the assistant coach of a girls swim team at UCLA, is about to form a couple when his girlfriend, a talented young writer named Jenny Schecter, moves in after graduating from college in Iowa with the desire to start writing her first novel. Soon, after mixing with Bette and Tina s circle of lesbian friends at a party where Jenny has a brief sexual encounter with Marina Ferrer, an attractive European woman who runs The Planet, their local coffeehouse hangout, Jenny learns that her mid-west university education may not have prepared her for what she will learn about life, lust and love in Los Angeles among the lesbian community. Bette and Tina s other friends include; Dana Fairbanks, a prim and proper, conservative tennis player who dreams of making it big, but who is closeted; Alice Pieszecki, a liberal and  out-of-the-closet  magazine writer who has not had any luck in the dating service for some time and sets in motion a  conquest chart  to see who has been with who; Shane McCutcheon is an unkempt, sexually aggressive, hairstylist who s unapologetic lifestyle of one-night stands begins to catch up with her when one conquest, Lacey, refuses to take no for an answer to get lost. Rounding out the group is Bette s older, straight, half-sister Kit Porter, whom has problems dealing with her sagging singing career and alcoholism.