In rural Virginia in 1958, history professor Gen Rider has just secured tenure at Baines College, a private school for white women. With two strikes against her--she's a woman in a men's field, and she's a race traitor who teaches "Negro history"--Gen has accomplished the near-impossible and should be celebrating. Instead, she's mourning the break-up of a long-distance relationship with another woman--a romance she has tightly guarded, even from her straight female mentor.

Danger hits close to home when a nearby men's college uncovers a "homosexual circle" involving its faculty, staff, and students. Suspicion spreads across the two campuses, threatening Gen and her friend Fenton, the gay theater director at Baines. When a neighbor spies Gen kissing a woman in her own home, hearings into moral turpitude at the college catch her in a McCarthy-like web. With both her private life and her teaching methods under scrutiny, Gen faces an agonizing choice: Which does she value more, her career or her right to privacy?