A tight-knit group of thirty-somethings -- gay, lesbian and straight -- struggle to live, love and stay friends in modern-day Los Angeles as circumstances conspire to tear them apart.

The Herlihys are a working class family from Chicago whose three children take wildly divergent paths: Brian joins the Marines right out of High School and goes to Vietnam, Michael becomes involved in the civil rights movement and after campaigning for Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy becomes involved in radical politics, and Katie gets pregnant, moves to San Francisco and joins a hippie commune. Meanwhile, the Taylors are an African-American family living in the deep South. When Willie Taylor, a minister and civil rights organizer, is shot to death, his son Emmet moves to the city and eventually joins the Black Panthers, serving as a bodyguard for Fred Hampton.

A beautiful young woman is abducted from her place of work and held as a sex slave. Two years later, frightened and confused, she manages to escape and begins to use meditation to recapture her sensory memories of captivity. Finally, she achieves a mental picture of her abductor and, realising that he is close at hand, decides to confront him even if it means putting her life in danger.