In 1989, the city ordered the store to close daily from 2 to 6 a.m. The alleyway behind it was a well-known gay cruising spot, and residents and sheriff’s deputies said the 24-hour bookstore attracted prostitutes and drug dealers. The West Hollywood store had its share of drama.
The Silver Lake shop closed in 2016 amid declining sales. A short-lived Sherman Oaks store closed in the late 1990s after the city ordered it to stop selling porn because it was too close to an elementary school. ‘Tell me about my son.’ Where were you, lady? I had nothing to say to parents like that.”Īt its peak, Circus of Books had three locations. “And sometimes,” Karen said, “I would get a call from a mother. “A lot of parents wouldn’t come to get their things or come to their funerals,” Barry said. The Masons by that time had bought the building, which had several apartments upstairs, and their tenants were dying, too. “It just - um - they shouldn’t have died.” “They were just so young,” Karen said, sighing. It was the only time, Karen said, she ever broke the rules. If they needed public assistance to pay for expensive medication, the couple would pay them off the books in cash so they could keep unemployment benefits. If employees felt well enough to work, the Masons encouraged them to come in so they could have some normalcy. “They were extraordinary young guys who I looked up to.” “Somebody I just met would be dead the next week, then another person and another person … as a kid, I didn’t have any perception that that was unusual. In the 1980s, young Rachel noticed that her parents’ clerks kept disappearing.
Rachel and her brothers sometimes sneaked into the pornography section to giggle at the movie covers until their mom yelled at them to get out. “This store represents a time capsule of a different era … when being queer was really underground,” she said. It wasn’t until she started making the film that she realized how revered Karen and Barry were in the LGBTQ community. Rachel, 40, an artist and musician, is making a documentary about her parents’ shop, which will debut on the film festival circuit this spring. I was fighting with my mom about my hair color … and they were actually dealing in hardcore videos.” “They were just so good at this balancing act that we had no clue about it. “I was this little rebel, and what I didn’t know was that they were outlaws in their own way,” she said. They had to go to synagogue with their mother. She and her two brothers had to get straight A’s. Rachel Mason said that when she was growing up, her parents were much more strict than her friends’. The place was selling the magazine, but you weren’t allowed to look at it.”
You’d worry there was a vice officer in there who would arrest you for looking at the magazines. “Sometimes the men in there looking at straight erotica would see you looking at a gay-oriented magazine and get upset. “There was just enough space to edge in and look, and there were porn magazines for the straight men and the gay men.
Gay-themed magazines played an important role in assuring people they weren’t alone at a time when homosexuality was taboo, said Joseph Hawkins, director of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC.įor decades, gay magazines - including ONE, the non-pornographic magazine for which the archive is named - that were sold at newsstands in big cities were obscured behind a tarp or curtain and sold alongside bawdy straight magazines, even if the gay periodicals had no nude pictures. Along with the pornography, they sold obscure novels from LGBTQ authors, as well as science fiction books, foreign newspapers, even Bibles. The couple kept the staff and changed the name to Circus of Books. Barry made a deal with the property manager: He’d pay half the man’s $1,400 monthly rent until he was evicted if the Masons could take over the lease afterward. The Masons eventually learned the bookstore’s owner, who had fallen behind on magazine payments, was being evicted. Customers were so glad when the magazines arrived, “they would come out front and help me unload it.” “I’d have to fill the whole truck up just to fill those titles,” Barry said. One West Hollywood store, Book Circus, ordered 600 gay titles, including Blueboy and Honcho, each month and instantly sold out. She was pregnant at the time, so she hired unemployed musicians - she preferred drummers, who always seemed the most reliable - to help with heavy lifting. In the 1970s, Barry made a decent living selling accessories he’d invented for dialysis machines until the cost of medical malpractice insurance became too much.Īfter Karen, who had worked as a journalist, spotted a newspaper ad seeking magazine distributors for Larry Flynt - the publisher of Hustler and Chic - Barry started driving around to liquor stores and newsstands, taking orders.