Karen and Barry Mason: The suburban mum and dad who ran Circus of Books hardcore porn empire

Karen and Barry were just another ordinary, conservative, mum and dad. But the “dirty little secret” they hid from the neighbours was they were hardcore porn peddlers.

Karen Mason, a conservative and deeply religious mum-of-three, is inspecting a wall to ceiling display of dildos. She has just bought 12 bottles of anal lube, infused with cloves that tingle rather than numb.

She glances at the dildos: opaque ones, transparent ones, pink, black and green ones.

“I don’t particularly enjoy looking at it. But I can notice it without really looking at it.”

Her daughter Rachel laughs: “It’s ridiculous. I mean how many years has she be doing this? And she says she doesn’t know what they do.

“She has been ordering dildos for so long, she probably knows the manufacturers going back decades. She knows everyone in the business,” she tells news.com.au from Los Angeles.

“It’s like a rocket scientist who says ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing but I’m working at NASA’. It’s absurd.”

Rachel remembers her childhood, and that of her two brothers, as being very ordinary. Her mum Karen and dad Barry were upstanding members of the Jewish community in LA. They fussed over their kids and Karen always wanted them to go to synagogue.

Karen and Barry Mason in their home. The couple somewhat reluctantly became the US’ largest distributors of XXX gay porn.

But her parents had a secret they kept from them and many others. Karen and Barry told people they ran a book shop. Which was kind of true. In reality, they ran one of the most successful pornography businesses in the US. Specifically, this unassuming straight couple from suburban LA, sold hardcore gay porn. And lots of it.

At one point, says Rachel, her mum and dad were the biggest distributors of gay porn in the country. It was a job that almost sent them to prison.

“My parents were not cool at all,” she says. “They were completely square, boring, religious and conservative. I was the one who was the outsider. So, it’s strange to think that my parents were as much part of the counter culture as I was, even though they came at it from a much more traditional lifestyle than me.”

Karen and Barry ran Circus of Books, a store in the West Hollywood district of LA, that became an icon for the gay community and a target of conservative activists. The latter group, ironically, were probably much closer in viewpoint to the couple they pursued than they imagined.

“Ideologically my mum was against the store,” Rachel says. “She was trying to be the perfect 1950s housewife and she was deeply conflicted; she would probably even call herself a smut peddler.

“But her identity was more complex because you couldn’t open a store like this unless you were less conservative than you thought.”

Circus of Books bookstore in Los Angeles

Rachel, an artist and filmmaker, decided to record the last months of the store in a new Netflix documentary called Circus of Books, that has its Australian premiere next week at Sydney’s QueerScreen Mardi Gras film festival.

She’s been to Australia before. Several years ago, she appeared in an art piece in Melbourne dressed as a clown lip synching excerpts of Donald Trump’s speeches. She admits its audience was niche.

Rachel said she was surprised it was a film about her own family has opened her work up to a wider audience.

Her mum is less thrilled about the documentary’s success: “She says it’s a good film. She just wishes it was about someone else’s family. I think she hoped it would have lived and died in the eccentric circles I have, rather than being shown all around the world,” says Rachel.

Rachel Mason, the daughter of Karen and Barry, and director of Circus of Books.

‘DIRTY LITTLE SECRET’

Her mum and dad didn’t set out to run a porn empire. They just wanted a stable income to raise a family. Barry was initially an inventor of equipment for kidney dialysis machines. But it didn’t last.

In the early 1980s, scratching around for what to do next, the couple saw an ad from Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. He needed people to deliver his porn titles to LA shops because mainstream magazine distributors refused to do so.

“You don’t have the luxury of not earning a living,” Karen remarks in the film. “You have to figure out what you’re going to do.”

Barry said the work was actually quite easy and lucrative. When one bookshop that took gay titles looked set to flounder, the Masons pounced and bought it renaming it Circus of Books. A stop gap between jobs became a career.

“It was a dirty little secret. It was like an uncle in jail, no one talked about it but everyone knew it was happening,” says Rachel.

The kids were shielded from the true nature of the business until towards the end of high school, but they picked up clues here and there.

“I remember thinking that every store in the world had an over-18s section you weren’t allowed to go into.”

When Karen and Barry married they had no idea they would end up running a porn business.

The array of titles the store stocked was mind boggling: Almost Caught, Hot Stuff, Hung Beach. At one point the Masons became producers of wildly popular gay porn. They teamed up with Jeff Stryker, who Rachel describes as the “Brad Pitt of gay movies,” one of the 1980s most famous porn stars.

“They really were fundamental to the gay porn industry,” she says.

“My mum is basically a gay porn expert. I have yet to meet anyone as well versed as my mum in gay porn.”

She puts her parent’s success down to them treating it like a day job.

“A lot of people were not able to see it as just a business. They get caught up in the partying and the drama. My parents clocked in and out, and made sure the books were done,” Rachel says. “You can be in the centre of something and not part of it.

“They only went to the porn awards once.”

The shop was far more than the titles it stocked tough. At a time when discrimination against LGBTI people was rife, and AIDS was decimating the community, it became a refuge for people looking for others like them. The Masons treated their staff well and looked after them, keeping many on for years. Karen was conservative, but compassionate.

Karen was a frequent visitor to adult expos to stock up the store – although she averted her eye from many of the exhibits.

CLOSE TO JAIL

But while they may have tried to keep a low profile, the moral crusaders in the Reagan Government had Circus of Books in their sights.

The Masons were on the right side of the law for their corner of Los Angeles. However, the spotlight fell on them when the shop posted a couple of VHS tapes to a corner of Pennsylvania where porn was highly illegal.

“I didn’t realise the government had taskforces dedicated to bringing down small businesses in a supposedly free country,” says Rachel.

She believes the crackdown on gay porn was a proxy for stamping on the gay community, and trying to put it in its place.

“It was bizarre. The government showed up at the shop with guns drawn, and the FBI too. All for shipping a VHS tape. It’s laughable now,” she remarks.

“In those days you had to buy a magazine. Now everyone’s cell phone is a giant avenue to hardcore porn.

“I later learned how close they got to jail. The irony would have been these anti-porn people that said it was destroying families would have destroyed my family.

“My parents were doing hardcore porn but they were doing it for the most wholesome reasons – to support the family.”

In its heyday, Circus of Books was an institution for the gay community in LA.

Karen and Barry’s success is put down to their work ethic and not getting involved in the drama of the porn industry.

Rachel says the documentary had a profound effect on her. “It was the scariest thing I’ve done; I didn’t realise what a vulnerable endeavour it was looking into my family’s secrets.”

Her parents changed, she says, through running Circus of Books. Her mum is still deeply religious but she has balanced that with embracing the LGBTI community and marching in Pride parades.

She calls her parents “accidental heroes” of the gay and trans community. Her dad was always more relaxed about the business, her mum is still in two minds. Even after decades of graft.

“In her mind, my mum’s ashamed of it. This dimly lit porn store which she doesn’t want to be associated with. But I’m pro sexual liberation and freedom, and I think she should be proud,” Rachel says.

“They weren’t there waving their freak flags, they were just behind the scenes running a store, without discrimination. Just another mom and pop doing their bit for LGBT rights.”

Circus of Books screens on Thursday February 20 at the Dendy Cinema, King St, Newtown as part of the QueerScreen Mardi Gras Film Festival.