That’s her whole constant mantra: No one’s gonna care, this is not interesting to anybody. No one is going to be interested in this.” And now, of course, it’s on Netflix for the world to see.
It’s funny to hear your mom say in the doc, “I don’t know what you’re gonna make out of all this filming.
Here, Mason discusses the power of straight parents as activists, what it says about porn that celebs who shopped at the store won’t openly admit it, and the awkward dinner table talk her parents have with her partner, transsexual porn star and activist Buck Angel.
TV titan Ryan Murphy executive produced the film. Karen and Barry, who still own the building even though Circus of Books closed in 2019, would go on to become wealthy LGBTQ activists and PFLAG parents.īut in the 1980s, the business was kept a secret from their three children, including Rachel and her gay brother Josh, who appear in “Circus of Books” along with former porn star Jeff Stryker and “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” winner Alaska Thunderfuck. Hard times forced Karen, a former journalist, and Barry, a former special visual effects engineer who worked on Stanley Kubrick’s “2001,” to think fast, so they took over Circus of Books, which became a queer cultural institution. And now thanks to their daughter, filmmaker and artist Rachel Mason, her parents’ story is a Netflix documentary.įor the couple, however, selling and producing gay porn was just business as usual. But for over 35 years, they owned a bookstore that sold videos like “Confessions of a Two Dick Slut” and “Meat Me at the Fair” in West Hollywood. Gay porn is not what straight, religious-conservative married couple Barry and Karen Mason thought they’d become known for. Filmmaker Rachel Mason on the Netflix doc she made about her parents who ran a gay porn empireīy Chris Azzopardi | photos courtesy Netflix