For over 35 years, the gay porn shop “Circus of Books” gave the members of the Los Angeles LGBT community a safe space to celebrate themselves without judgment. Not many people knew that the owners of the shop were Karen and Barry Mason – she was an ex-journalist and he was a special effects master for big Hollywood films such as “2001: A space odyssey” and “Star Wars”. A straight, religious, Jewish couple with three children that attended a religious Jewish school and went to Synagogue on the weekends and were never aware of their parents occupation (and neither did friends and close family members). The Masons witnessed the HIV plague first hand and lost a generation of treasured employees. They became social activists, and yet throughout the whole period never identified as such – only as entrepreneurs serving clients the world ignored, until the internet had ruined their business.
“Circus of books”, which was produced by Ryan Murphy, is Rachel Mason, the couple’s daughter, first documentary film. For the first time she puts a camera in front of her parents, the least radical people she ever knew. She asks how they became the biggest distributors of gay porn in the the USA and why did Karen react so negatively when her own son came out of the closet.

The screening is courtesy of Netflix.