A close friendship between two struggling women writers evolves into a passionate love affair. What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything... San Francisco in the mid-to-late 1990s and two women are trying to build a successful lesbian relationship. But issues of self-image, love, sexuality, and intimacy somehow seem to push them apart just as much as bring them closer. They say opposites attract, and on the surface it could even be true. But relationships are about going deeper, and all too often finding out that the things we see and like to begin with are only a thin layer of the person we want to get to know.

Dave Madden starts off the new year of 2011 with a haunting dream, which doesn't bode well for his and Aaron's relationship. While Dave clings to the stability he has found with Aaron, thoughts of his old flame Matt Cohen obsess him. A sudden trip back to Boston for a family emergency adds to Dave's angst and shakes his sense of identity further. In this sequel to Elsie Street, all bets are off.

"I want to be more like the islands themselves: warm, spicy, tolerating storms of rain and wind, beautiful, fertile, changeable, adventurous, enduring."In this honest and compelling short travel memoir, Gabriella West and her partner Selena travel to Kauai, Hawaii's garden island, in their first trip as a couple, staying at a new age-y women's guesthouse. The couple struggle with anger, misunderstandings, and a ghostly presence in the guesthouse that terrifies Selena. Will their trip to Hawaii end up tearing them apart?West takes us on a colorful, provocative journey of adventure and personal discovery that unlocks truths about the past and ends in a moment of sweetness and euphoria.

Italy, 1980s. The unnamed narrator and her English friend Liz are booksmart but inexperienced 18-year-old students on a budget traveling around Northern Italy by train. As they share adventures and conversation, their edgy friendship not surprisingly begins to deepen. But it's on their final nocturnal train trip back to Florence that they go beyond friendship into an act of bold sexual experimentation... This short story was first published in the Cleis Press anthology Hot Ticket: Tales of Lesbians, Sex, and Travel.

At 15, Cathy Quinn is an intelligent misfit living in 1980s Dublin. As the book opens she discovers that her charming older brother Stevie, who's gay, is falling in love with the one boy in school whom she likes. Over her last two years of school, Cathy struggles with her repressed, unhappy family, coming to terms with her powerful attraction to her best friend Jeanette, and leaving Ireland. "The Leaving" is a realistic yet lyrical look at adolescence and first love.Above all, the novel offers a wry, raw look at growing up in the conservative, recession-plagued Dublin of the 1980s, when homosexuality was still taboo, and being different was not tolerated.

New York, 1930. Bubbly young blonde Betsy Parker is left a widow at only 25, after her older banker husband commits suicide in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Her family has sent her off on a voyage to England by cruise ship to recover. Innocent and curious to explore, Betsy attracts the attention of both the ship's captain and an experienced and exotic English artist, Claire, who initiates Betsy into the delights of lesbian sex. In this intensely erotic tale told in the form of first-person diary entries, Betsy is pulled between wild sexual encounters with the dominant captain and her deepening bond with Claire. Whom will she choose?