LOS ANGELES — When “Circus of Books” was recently released on Netflix it gripped the popular culture for weeks. On the surface, it is an elegiac chronicle of the last days of a beloved two-store retail chain in Los Angeles that held an outsized influence on the culture of the city, particularly its gay community. But the film is also a warm-hearted love letter to the small business owners who are the lifeblood of American enterprise, the maverick men and women whose brick-and-mortar dreams are the bedrock of adult entertainment.
“Who knew the whole world cared about gay porn as much as we do?” exclaimed Rachel Mason, the director of “Circus of Books” and the daughter of the iconic chain’s proprietors, Karen and Barry Mason.
When she spoke to XBIZ, Mason was amidst a dizzying swirl of press interviews. Her film boasts a 98% “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes and its elevator pitch, an irresistible premise, has earned pop-culture headlines around the world.
Mason was eager to speak with XBIZ about her advocacy for the men and women who populate adult entertainment, particularly its retailers, like her parents. Buck Angel, the activist, educator and entrepreneur who is Mason’s real-life partner facilitated our interview.
Over 30 years ago, Karen and Barry Mason, a middle-class Jewish couple, opened the original Circus of Books, famously perched at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Jolla Avenue in West Hollywood, and doggedly kept the location open throughout decades of rapid economic and social change, particularly as West Hollywood became a mecca for the LGBT community, as well as during the devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic, and into the 21st Century as skin mags faded in favor of tube sites and hookup apps.
Circus of Books became an unlikely battleground for First Amendment rights under President George H. W. Bush when an employee shipped a box of straight and gay porn tapes to a customer in rural Pennsylvania. The sale was a sting, and the Masons were indicted on federal charges of transporting obscene materials across state lines. After years of agonizing litigation, which the Masons heroically kept from their neighbors, synagogue and young children, they agreed to a pretrial diversion program and a fine when a more progressive Justice Department was formed under President Bill Clinton.
Rachel Mason, as her film shows, has been following around her family with a camera since childhood. In 2015, she sat her parents on their couch and had them explain how they ended up running a hardcore gay porn business for three decades. The Silver Lake location closed in 2016; the West Hollywood outlet followed three years later.
"I started documenting in 2015 because my mom, her mantra every week was, 'We’re closing! It’s done! I’m just gonna do it,'" Mason recalled.
Mason’s film premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. The “intimate and probing documentary… explores the contradictions of growing up in an unconventional household where her mom could be found volunteering at her synagogue or re-stocking issues of Handjobs Magazine,” noted the festival summary of the film. “It's an honest and engaging portrait of the legendary X-rated emporium and its unlikely proprietors.”
Mega-producer Ryan Murphy caught wind of the project and brought it to Netflix, which snapped up worldwide streaming rights with Murphy as an executive producer.
One year later and Mason’s warm, witty and melancholic film is the talk of Hollywood.
“I knew I always wanted to make this [film] at some point,” she told XBIZ. “I had an art career. I was an artist and more of a musician and doing things in the experimental world [in New York]. I was more in the avant-garde scene. I did things in museums and galleries, but I didn’t have any thought of doing something that would be a mainstream project.”
Her initial thought was to make something that documented the history of the store that would play LGBT film festivals and exist as source material for academia.
“The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives,” she said. “I thought, ‘If it gets there, I’m good.’ So I came back to L.A. and I started documenting and, you know, there’s always so much stuff that’s hilarious whenever my parents are around. It really is — there’s a wealth of material. So I brought in a producer that knew about making documentaries.”
Documentarian Cynthia Childs immediately gave Mason “a wider perspective,” she recalled. “‘This is a whole story about your family. This is about you, your mom, your brothers — it’s not just this store, Rachel.’ She gave me exactly what I needed, which I couldn’t see, standing inside of the story. It really snowballed after that, just diving in and working like crazy to document the store closing. Huge shout-out to my editor, Kathryn Robson, because we had maybe 200 hours of footage.”
Mason recognizes she picked up her camera in the nick of time. “Thank god I actually did get it. My parents are small business owners. They are day-to-day people. They don’t step out of their little window and just look out at what they’ve accomplished,” she said. “I think many small business owners are the same. It’s really hard to run a business. You’re just able to do what is right in front of you. The fact that I was able to do it at all is really because of the proximity I had to this business.”
Initially, “Circus of Books” is about how this most unlikely couple fostered a thriving gay adult business. Rachel Mason interviewed former and longtime employees — including “RuPaul’s Drag Race” breakout star Alaska Thunderfuck — and poked around the storeroom with her father in the store’s last weeks. She even followed her mother to the ANME Founders show in Burbank as the elder Mason placed customer orders with various pleasure product manufacturers for the last time.
Mason sat down with two adult biz luminaries: megastar Jeff Stryker, who held meet-and-greets at Circus of Books for his massively successful star vehicles the Masons produced, and none other than Hustler founder Larry Flynt, who explained with admiration how the Masons were the first to distribute his then-new periodical and how their efforts helped to establish the iconic brand in its early days.
“All these people were right there in my dad’s cell phone! I took advantage of the simple fact that these were just my parents’ actual business associates,” she told XBIZ with a laugh.
But it is the emotional testimonials Mason recorded with former Circus of Books customers that form the beating heart of the film.
“In part, it is a family story,” she told XBIZ. “But it’s also a community story. It’s entirely about all the people that never got to live their full lives. Before the AIDS epidemic hit and just created a giant crater in the heart of the community, this was a group of people who had no rights. Even to this day, we still have a constant struggle.”
“Gay porn and gay erotica in general was so taboo because it was a culture that was not allowed to exist,” she recalled. “I spoke to men in their sixties, tears streaming down their faces, who told me if they hadn’t seen this material, they would never have known they were not the only person in the world that had these feelings. To be gay was to be up there with the worst element of what you could ever be in our culture.”
To be involved with gay erotica, at any level, is “a form of activism,” she said.
“What gay porn did for gay people was wholly different than just getting your rocks off. It was actually validating people's existence when they had nowhere else to see it. It had to exist in an underground way because it was not possible to be above-ground. The only depictions of gay people in mainstream media were as some kind of ridiculous joke. What gay porn did for people was so much more profound than just sex.”
She cited one particular testimonial that hooked her heart.
“I love the quote in the film, ‘To see two men naked and unafraid. That gave us something to be proud of.’ That wonderful customer saying that with a smile on his face,” she recalled. “Literally, those two words: ‘Naked and unafraid.’ I think that that was something very particular to the gay community and a wholly different thing when it comes to heterosexual erotic content.”
“I have to say porn, in and of itself, is just a hard cause to get behind,” she said. “This is why someone like Ryan Murphy getting behind films like mine means so much. He [backed] a film with actual hardcore gay porn as its front-and-center content that was going full-speed-ahead into the mainstream world. For Ryan to look at this film in the way that he did and say, ‘This is a reference point for our culture; this is actually important,’ is a big deal. And now I’m getting emails from people in Kenya, Japan, India, Brazil.”
Mason has also taken on an unexpected role as an evangelist for mainstream adult entertainment. Her relationship with Angel had already broadened her perspective, but Mason’s media tour to promote the release of “Circus of Books” has been an eye-opening experience.
“I do think that people are really fascinated by this industry,” she mused. “With Buck, I have a new perspective now that I’m his partner. I am just amazed at the characters in the industry and the stories of the different people within it. It really does feel like a family because it’s a group of people that [often] feels under siege by the entire culture.”
However, she is frequently asked questions that are “insulting right off the bat,” she said.
“‘How do you feel about promoting an industry that promotes sex trafficking?’ First off, sex trafficking is an illegal activity. That’s like saying the restaurant business promotes food poisoning. But [this is] an industry with many, many, many, if not all, people following the rules, following the guidelines, doing this consensually, doing this because they’ve chosen to do it. The people that I’ve met made the decision to go into this with clarity, when you have lots of other options. Many of the people doing it enjoy doing it or they’ve found a way to enjoy it. This is what they’ve chosen to do. I’m just so insulted by the way people in the industry are treated.”
As “Circus of Books” explores, Karen Mason, in particular, wrestled with how to reconcile her business with her devout religious faith.
“Perhaps it’s naïve. I know that my parents, at least my mother, lived with the shame of being so tied to an industry that was so denigrated,” she said. “But I’ve become my own personal kind of activist for it, partially because I know my parents — their number-one priority was family values. So I laugh in the face of all those right-wing crazy people that try to say ‘family values’ is at odds with pornography because they were trying to destroy my own family and send my parents to jail.”
“You know, my parents had a business, they supported many people, and kept employees for 30-plus years — employees that had kids of their own,” she said. “There were kids who were abandoned by their own families that my parents took in because they cared about them. So I feel repulsed, as a whole, by the way the industry is treated. It’s mavericks who are in this industry. It’s brave people.”
Our conversation turned to the fortitude required to choose sex work as a trade. She cited Angel and Stormy Daniels as revolutionaries for their forthright, unapologetic attitudes.
“We started this conversation talking about Buck and I can think of no one more brave than him,” she said. “Not only were there no representations of trans men in porn when he started off, but his work is a form of activism for trans people in particular. How brave is it to present a body to the world that the world is not comfortable with? It’s a really profound thing. I’ve seen it with him, firsthand, just the way he’ll be treated if he’s doing a speaking engagement in a mainstream situation, often it will come up, ‘How do we [explain] you’re in the adult industry?’ As opposed to being proud of the fact that this is a person who is a shining example of a success story, somebody who came out of the adult industry, created multiple brands, multiple new business opportunities, and really was able to thrive because of the start that they got in this industry.”
Mason is also among Daniels’ most ardent fans. “I think there’s also the amazing awesomeness of Stormy Daniels who revealed to the world how much more intelligent she was than our own freaking president and proved that you could be a sexually empowered and liberated woman. I do think that sometimes the focus is on the tragedies of the porn industry. I really do feel like Stormy brought a kind of revolution when she was able to so forthrightly talk about her experience with the president. She’s clearly an empowered woman who works in this industry and is not taking shit from anybody. That’s really important for women.”
A twist, of sorts, occurs past the halfway point of “Circus of Books” when Mason reveals her mother — a practical, pragmatic and deeply loyal woman of conviction — initially rejected her gay son when he came out of the closet to them. The paradox surprised no one more than Karen Mason herself. In the years since her son first came out, the family matriarch has educated herself. She is now a leading community liaison for PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).
The inclusion of this story thread humanizes the Masons in a very direct and personal way, and through them, she personalizes all indefatigable brick-and-mortar retailers whose lives are positively influenced by their work.
("People can indeed live at war with themselves and not know it. Here's a case of great things happening once peace is declared," observed the Wall Street Journal in its review of the film.)
The elder Masons, now comfortably settled into retirement, brush aside any claims of activism or heroism. As the film documents, they had a family, and employees, to care for and protect. Circus of Books enabled them to do both for over 30 years.
“I feel the loss of that store like I feel the loss of a friend,” Karen Mason mused. “That is how a lot of people feel. It’s important to publicize these stories. It’s sort of shocking to me that my film might be among the first of its kind to do just that. I set out to make a film about gay porn and why it’s important and here I am making a film about a parent who is literally parsing the [holy books] to accept her gay child. That’s the real hidden secret of the film.”
“This could be a moment right now where the adult industry could start getting some respect and if this film has anything to do to help that, I’d be very happy,” she said.
Follow "Circus of Books" on Twitter.
JC Adams is the News Desk Manager for XBIZ.
