A poignant account of how a devout Jewish mom stopped thinking that her gay son was 'an abomination' ... and much, much more

THE Netflix documentary Circus of Books is many things. It’s a portrait of a family, an era, a culture, a business, and a battle against homophobia.  With its scattered approach, it’s fair to call it a video scrapbook.

Karen Mason. Screenshot via Netlix’s ‘Circus of Books’

The “scrapbook” label feels especially apt, since Circus of Books is directed by the daughter of Karen and Barry Mason, the couple at the heart of this story.  And under Rachel Mason’s direction – using lots of home movies, personal photos, and contemporary footage of her parents’ lives – this is an intimate film.

The business for which the film is named was a hub of LA gay culture for 40 years. A variety of onscreen commentators – customers, employees, activists – describe how Circus of Books was a refuge where gay men could meet and be accepted. A fixture on Santa Monica Boulevard since the 1960s, Karen and Barry purchased it in 1982.

Screenshot via Netflix’s ‘Circus of Books’

For the couple, this was purely a business decision, not a storm-the-barricades act of radicalism.  Given room to narrate their own biographies, Karen recounts burning out from her brief career in crime beat journalism, while Barry was a medical inventor who had to find a new gig after malpractice costs made his profession unsustainable. Needing to support a family of five, they fell into owning and managing Circus of Books.

Adult movie legend Jeff Stryker features in ‘Circus of Book’

Obviously, the pair had a knack for business, expanding their book and porn shop into a second location, then becoming the busiest producer and distributor of hardcore gay porn flicks in the US.  Only the 2008 recession and the availability of free internet porn halted their growth, profitability, and importance to the local gay community.

The documentary effectively tells how they weathered two seismic aspects of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the AIDS epidemic and Ronald Reagan’s crusade against “obscenity.”  Rachel Mason affectingly mixes snapshots of employees who died from AIDS complications, along with interviews of survivors who describe Karen and Barry’s “small human kindnesses,” hospital visits, and phone calls to out-of-state relatives that lightened many sufferers’ burdens.

For the battle fought between moralists against pornography and defenders of privacy and free speech, Rachel Mason lets her parents’ attorney and First Amendment specialist John Weston do the heavy lifting on the legal details. And in Circus of Books, this is where the cross-pollination between Karen and Barry’s business and personal sides starts to get particularly interesting.

Rachel and her brothers Josh and Micah had no idea that, thanks to a federal sting operation, their father faced a real possibility of going to jail on a felony charge of shipping porn across state lines.

Of the siblings, Josh, above, spends the most time in front of the camera, repeatedly using the word “conventional” to label their home life. I would add “compartmentalized,” as the kids had to learn from their friends what kind of bookstore their parents ran. In addition, Karen was very active at her conservative synagogue, where she told no-one of her profession, while the kids felt religious ritual and participation were forced upon them.

Across its run time, the prevailing tone of Circus of Books is one of earnest historiography, though there is something dissonantly comical about seeing a Jewish grandmother walking the aisles of a trade expo, purchasing lube and cock rings. In its final 20 minutes, the documentary becomes far more poignant, as Josh narrates his struggles in coming out to his parents.  (Wisely, this is one of the few moments in Circus of Books when Rachel Mason inserts footage of her own reaction as interviewer/sibling, choking up as Josh describes his silent fear at the time.)

Image via Netflix’s ‘Circus of Books’

On camera, Josh, above, relates he had little worry about his father’s response, as a secularist whose default mode is smiling sanguinity. It was his mother’s reaction he dreaded, given her religious rigidity and alpha family status.

Rachel Mason nicely jumps back and forth among family members, to chronicle how for them at least, love triumphed over dogmatism.  This segment is fascinating for a couple of reasons.  First, it’s always intriguing how we can partition our beliefs into communal, family, and individual portions, and how the three portions don’t always intersect.

Second, it’s still a source of astonishment for me how believers can contort their hermeneutics to fit whatever box preserves them psychologically. (As an ex-Christian who spent years studying the Torah and New Testament, I think it’s intellectually dishonest to claim that both parts of the Bible are anything but anti-gay, but not everyone can gaze upon this conclusion head-on.)

Nonetheless, to paraphrase the gay American poet Walt Whitman, we human beings contain multitudes and are inevitably a jumble of contradictions. Rachel Mason’s filmic scrapbook commendably acknowledges those contradictory multitudes that comprise her parents’ lives, without trying to tidy them up.

Mason has done a fine job as director and co-writer here, as well as composing and performing some of the music for her documentary. Wearing multiple hats seems the name of the game with Circus of Books, as co-writer Kathryn Robson was also the film’s editor, splendidly cobbling together footage past and present into a coherent if meandering whole.

Towards its upbeat-verging-on-triumphal conclusion, Mason’s documentary does come close to feeling like an infomercial for the organization Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).  But if you’re going to use your film to stump for a group, there are few better ones to promote.

Circus of Books is now available for instant viewing on Netflix.

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