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"Porn has always had a place in the gay community," said one longtime customer, Don Norman. Through interviews with former customers and employees, viewers come to understand how important an institution like Circus of Books was for the gay community in '80s West Hollywood. The film is much more successful as the former. And we also have this story about the revealing of a best-kept family secret, rooted in the inherent dichotomy between publicly adhering to conservative religious ideology and privately owning a sexually explicit business. We have the oral history of a cultural landmark that, at the time of filming, is going under - kind of a "Pornhub killed the video store" model. It's at this point that "Circus of Books" establishes two dominant narratives. They literally cut the sign in half, swapped the words, paid for a neon "of" and they were in business, soon opening a second location in Silver Lake. They ended up in the world of magazines, quickly shifted to the pornographic variety because of the profit margin and eventually stepped into retail, taking over a failing porn store called Book Circus. When she got pregnant and he had some hiccups at work, they needed to make a career shift because, as Karen puts it, "you don't have the luxury of not earning a living." Karen was a journalist, Barry worked in film and had several patented medical inventions on the side.
It's clear from the beginning of the film, currently streaming on Netflix, that Karen and Barry Mason didn't intend on owning a sex shop. In "Circus of Books," Mason's documentary about her parents' bookstore, she explores what it meant for her "nice, straight Jewish parents" to own a gay porn and adult goods store in West Hollywood - and become the biggest distributor of hardcore gay films in the United States - during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
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This statement was technically accurate, but the full truth, according to artist and filmmaker Rachel Mason, was shrouded in a Mafia-like secrecy you didn't talk about the bookstore outside the family and, if she and her brothers would occasionally visit the store, they had to abide by strict instructions: "Don't look around, look at the floor."
The default line in the Mason family was that their family ran a bookstore.