Karen and Barry Mason, a nice Jewish couple with three children and a suburban home, are the most unlikely pair to ever own a gay porn bookshop, a business they ran for 37 years.
At one point, they were “probably the biggest distributor of hardcore gay films in the United States,” says Karen.
How does this even happen?
Circus of Books, a documentary made by their daughter Rachel, an artist, filmmaker and musician, tells the personal tale – the family background, with intimate details – as well as the deeper significance of the eponymous bookshop and the role it played in gay culture in the 1980s.
“Mason basically has three documentaries on her hands – a gay-liberation history, a tale of civil-liberty battles, and an exploration of family dynamics – and the narratives have been stitched into one charming, if uneven, package,” writes Jerry Portwood for Rolling Stone.
This unevenness, I think, has something to do with the fact the documentary is made by a family member, with the inevitable self-editing; there are several side roads that could have been explored in more depth (like run-ins with the FBI). Still, there is so much to work with, and the important messages are conveyed.
In the mid-1970s, Barry and Karen found themselves in need of income. Fun fact: in the 1960s, Barry attended film school with Jim Morrison (The Doors), whose poem The Movie (from American Prayer) has the lines: Did you have a good world when you died?/ Enough to base a movie on?
Barry’s not dead, but the second question is definitely answered. This is indeed a fascinating story.
Who are Karen and Barry Mason?
Karen was a journalist, a keen one, who wrote for respected newspapers, covering serious news stories. “Karen Mason began her professional career as a journalist, pushing boundaries by writing about controversial subjects such as Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt,” writes LA Times’ Glenn Whipp.
Barry, described as someone whose “default state is happiness”, worked as a special-effects technician on 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Star Trek TV series, parlaying his technical knowledge into designing dialysis equipment.
“For [Karen], it might as well have been a hardware store, the dildos replaced with plungers and the cock rings as easily dispensed as nuts and bolts.”
The Masons began by distributing various magazines published by Flynt. Barry’s relationship with the West Hollywood store Book Circus resulted in the Masons buying the property in the early 80s, rebranding it by cutting the sign in half and rearranging the words. They took the cheapest approach to rebranding, in case the new venture didn’t work out.
It was never meant to last as long as it did, but business boomed, and expanded into porn movies. It put the children through college, Karen mentions. When they were growing up, they had no idea what their mom and pop did. “They owned a bookstore,” says one of the sons.
Karen, devoutly religious, attends shul regularly, and succeeded in separating her faith from her business She treated it like she would any other retail outlet, and seems to glaze over the pornographic content. Barry still comes across as the happy-go-lucky goof.
“For her, it might as well have been a hardware store, the dildos replaced with plungers and the cock rings as easily dispensed as nuts and bolts,” says Portwood. “But for so many other nameless patrons, Circus Of Books felt like liberation, and brought joy and pleasure and escape for generations. As one person explains: ‘It was a place you could go and find other people like yourself’.”
“I think what we did were small human kindnesses, in a very small way,” says Karen.
Viewers today need to remember that, back then, homosexuality was still perceived as an abomination; parents disowned sons who contracted Aids, and in 1987 Ronald Reagan “unveiled legislation … giving police the tools to keep up with high-technology purveyors of smut” as reported by AP News. To discover you were not alone was life-changing.
“I think what we did were small human kindnesses, in a very small way,” says Karen.
Her reason for separating her faith and her work become critically apparent later in the film, when it emerges that Josh Mason is gay. He talks about how he wanted to come out, but didn’t, so many times, and then he did. Barry took it well in his stride, but Karen, not so much. She says at the time she thought it was God’s way of punishing her for Circus of Books.
It took Karen at least a year to come to terms with having a gay son, and the happy ending to this is that she and Barry joined PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), attended meetings and have now become “big shots” in the organisation.
The rise of the internet led to the decline of real-life porn. Why go out to buy something when you can get it online? Why go hang out or cruise a bookshop when you have Grindr on your phone? Circus of Books finally closed its doors in February 2019, unable to sustain itself any longer.
“And now it’s gone,” says Portwood. “Ultimately, that’s why Rachel Mason’s accomplishment feels extraordinary: she’s made a movie about hardcore gay porn that can be enjoyed by the entire family. It will hopefully educate a large swath people — without freaking them out.”
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