For her sophomore feature filmmaker Rachel Mason turned her cameras on to her own parents to tell their unlikely tale of running the most successful Adult Book Store in West Hollywood. It was part a journey of discovery for her too as growing up with her 3 siblings in this nice middle class Jewish household, the source of her parents income was a closely guarded secret from everyone inside and outside of the family.
Karen and Barry Mason never ever intended to get involved in pornography, but when her journalism career started to wane, and his medical inventions no longer sold, they desperately needed an income to support their young family. A chance glance at a newspaper advert placed by the infamous publisher Larry Flynt alighted them to the fact that he was looking for independent distributors of his racy magazines.
To their amusement they quickly found out that not only were they good at selling on the magazines but they made a good profit too. They expanded their range of magazines, all of them with very pornographic content, and soon they had a very dependable business. When one of their customers preferred to buy drugs than pay his bills, they bought his store Circus Books , and swapped the name around, and were now retailers too.
Back then in the early 1980’s the store functioned as a safe space for gay people to mingle and meet and also provide a wealth of erotica that completely astonished gay men newly arrived from the homophobic Midwest. The clientele were like kids in a candy story and what the Barrys were selling in the store empowered their new lives as openly gay men. Whilst also becoming a resource for those closeted married men too..
Throughout the next few decades the very existence of the Book Store weighed heavily on the conscience of devoutly religious Karen, but at the very same time it didn’t stop the Mason’s from actually becoming the largest distributors of gay pornogarphic movies in the US . Jeff Styker the biggest porn star at the time now happily bears witness that he owed the sheer success of his career to them.
This was not the only paradox in the story for even though the Masons had become to be held in such high regard by the LGBTQ community, when one of their sons was college age and came out as gay, it was Karen who flipped her lid and reacted to the news very badly indeed.
In time she would come to accept her son’s sexuality and re-address the fact her views on homosexuality were not as liberal as she had assumed. She then did a 360 degree turn and she and Barry eventually became leading figures in the local PFLAG chapter.
There was modest mention of how they supported the local Community through the AIDS crisis and one suspects they, and Barry in particular, went out of their way to help out as much as they could.
The Circus of Books survived that era and also President Reagan’s attempts to censor and make businesses in the Adult Industry illegal, but eventually progress in the outside world would be their demise. Starting with the arrival of Amazon, the beginning of the Internet not only increased the competition where you could buy similar products, but when gay pornagraphy became available for free, the death knoll was unavoidable.
The interaction between Mason and her mother during the filming is totally fascinating. as at most other times Karen appears like this charming septuagenarian grandmother, but she cuts her daughter no slack and remains the strong willed matriarch that must always have her own way. Mason is ambivalent about the Store that put her through college and paid for her comfortable childhood, but she now makes us join her as voyeurs as she films some of the more outrageous products her parents sold.
Barry is portrayed almost as an innocent accomplice to his wife’s management of the business, which despite all her oft-repeated regrets and her efforts at keeping its very existence secret, she actually seemed to enjoy running.
This is a very personal journey for Mason and in many ways it feels what we are watching is just another of her home movies that should never have been shown outside the family. However much she left unsaid or chose to protect her family by not covering too deeply, this is still a fascinating film about a remarkable story. I hope all the Mason’s feel so too.
Labels: 2019, documentary
