Circus of Books

Karen and Barry Mason ran a shop in Los Angeles. It was called Circus of Books and from outside it looked like a bookstore. Inside, pornographic magazines and films were sold; for years the shop was one of the meeting points for gay men in the city. Karen and Barry are a traditional Jewish family; they raised their children within religious observance and for years told nobody what they did. Their daughter made the documentary. Rachel Mason directs. It dates from 2019 and was released on Netflix. Its most concrete side is the account of the business; how the shop was set up, how they entered distribution and the legal risks of the period are given in detail. The matter it treats is carrying on two lives at once; the mother does not see it as a contradiction and the film does not press her. The obscenity prosecutions at the end of the eighties are one strand; a federal investigation targeted the shop directly. During the epidemic the shop's staff and customers fell ill; that is the documentary's hardest section. The tension inside the family is part of the narrative too; the mother's reaction when one of their sons came out is discussed directly. Its limit is distance; the director is filming her own family and the critical view is limited. Who it is for: viewers who like family documentary and narratives about a city's history. Who it is not for: the structure is loose, the narrative personal, and the subject explicit for some viewers.