Growing up, Rachel Mason was unaware that her parents' bookstore made the bulk of its money from the sale and distribution of gay porn. Now, she's telling the story of their LA bookshop in a new documentary.
For years, Karen and Barry Mason ran a Los Angeles bookshop that sold and distributed gay pornography.For years, Karen and Barry Mason ran a Los Angeles bookshop that sold and distributed gay pornography.For her entire childhood and most of her adolescence, that's all that Rachel Mason knew about what her parents did for a living and all she cared to understand.
Now Rachel has grown up to be a filmmaker and her camera is present for the closing of Circus of Books' last location in West Hollywood in February 2019, as 21st century innovations made the business irrelevant as both porn shop and cruising spot. But what's fascinating about, her affectionate if thinly realized documentary, is how little her parents saw themselves as important fixtures of the gay community for 30 years.
One possible problem is that Karen Mason appears as if she'd rather not be bothered. It becomes a kind of running joke, established in early home videos, that she doesn't like to be on any of the cameras her daughter has toted around since childhood. Yet she's the one source of familial conflict in, because her husband Barry doesn't hold himself to any religious dogma and has a non-judgmental attitude that's applied to all aspects of his life.
Though there's a happy ending to this subplot, the director isn't able to evoke this family reckoning as powerfully as she could, perhaps because her mother is so good as deflecting questions and sinking into the day-to-day labors of winnowing the archives and shutting down the business.
"It's the parents' role to fight for change and the kids' role to have as normal a life as possible," says Karen late in the film, andplays like the product of normalcy. All the fights have been settled by the time the film begins, so it's more about putting various aspects of the story into well-labeled boxes and closing up shop. The sense of closure is satisfying, but it's missing a charge.
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