After Nick Guest moves in with a member of the English Parliament and his family, he encounters grand parties and hidden alliances. Nick experiences his first romance with a young black clerk and later with a beautiful and wealthy woman who will change his life.
Patriarch Paul, his loveable, slightly repressed gay son Fenno, and other members of the McLeod family deal with difficult issues of love and loss over the course of several years.
Ed Wintle, an early-forties gay man living in Manhattan, chronicles his attempts to deal with his thirteen-going-on-thirty niece during the year she spent living with him.
Seventeen-year-old Luke falls for new guy Curtis, who is secretly HIV positive, but when the two become involved, Curtis has trouble distancing himself from Luke in order to protect him from infection.