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.