The success of this venture led them to pursue brick-and-mortar legitimacy in West Hollywood. Then I learned that my parents were the real rebels.”Īs young parents in a financial pinch, the Masons placed an order for 2,500 pornographic magazines from a then little-known distributor named Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler. “I always thought they were totally boring,” Mason laughs. A friend, who had ventured into its infamous 18+ section, interrupted Mason’s teenage lament about her lame parents to inform her that Circus of Books housed an untold number of hardcore pornography videos and sex toys. The artist and filmmaker Rachel Mason had no idea that her parents’ tumbledown West Hollywood shop was at the epicenter of the Los Angeles gay pornography scene until she was in high school. As the owners of the infamous West Hollywood haunt Circus of Books, Barry and Karen Mason became the largest producers and distributors of hardcore gay pornography in ‘80s and ’90s Los Angeles, all unbeknownst to their family and friends. ![]() Karen and her husband Barry are the devoutly religious, jaw-droppingly square subjects of a recently released Netflix documentary, Circus of Books, directed by their daughter. “These are called cock rings,” a gray-haired and bespectacled Karen Mason tells her daughter, the renowned queer performance and visual artist Rachel Mason.
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