There are many L-words depicted in Showtime's newest drama "The L Word." It's set in Los Angeles. It explores loving relationships. But the l-word that strides above all others in this series is lesbians.

As a companion to "Queer as Folk," HBO's series about gay men, "The L Word" follows the lives of a group of lipstick lesbian friends living in Hollywood.

To complicate things further, many lesbians argue that there are even important differences between lipstick lesbians and femme lesbians. "While femmes can pass as straight, most are really adamant about being known to be queer, while lipstick lesbians are often in the closet," says Femme magazine's Drinkwater. "While lipstick lesbian is a description of what someone looks like, femme is a deep and meaningful identity that someone claims. Being a femme is really about sexual and feminine power, and we just radiate femininity. I can spot a femme wearing no makeup and Birkenstocks. For femmes, femininity isn't something you play with or apply with makeup. It's at your core."

I didn't bother returning last summer for my 10th Yale reunion because I still live part of each year in New Haven. I even thought I knew what was going on until Sara Cohen, class of '88, started talking about the "lipsticks" and the "crunchies." The former, she explains, are Yale's radical-chic lesbians; the latter, "the granola dykes who have old-fashioned utopian ideas about feminism." …

When I met Ms. Cohen, a self-proclaimed lipstick, she wore a white silk Pierrot outfit with a black leather baseball cap, dead-white face powder, opaque sunglasses and magic-marker-red lipstick.