Her conservative parents ran a legendary gay porn shop for over 35 years. Now, from obscenity charges to the AIDS crisis, she's telling its stories in a new Netflix documentary.

• Rachel Mason's Netflix documentary "Circus of Books" tells the colorful history of her parents' iconic queer porn bookstore.
• Circus of Books closed its last location in 2019 due to the rise of internet porn and dating apps.
• The documentary is a testament to how a small business had a large impact on the Los Angeles LGBTQ community.
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Growing up, Rachel Mason had a fairly typical, middle-class upbringing in Los Angeles. She had friends, two brothers, and loving parents who were involved in their synagogue. But there was a twist — her parents, Karen and Barry Mason, owned Circus of Books, a gay porn bookstore that was a cornerstone of Los Angeles's queer community for multiple decades. "Circus of Books," her upcoming documentary on Netflix, is an intimate look at the store's history and its last months before closing. A couple weeks before the film's premiere, Mason spoke to Insider about what she hopes people take away from her honest account of her parents' store.

Mason initially got the idea to make a documentary in 2004 when a Yale University professor told her that Circus of Books was "part of gay history."

She recalled. "I have always thought it was kind of a fun, quirky little 'facts about Rachel' that would just entertain people at a party." However, Mason's professor stressed to her that the bookshop once filled a crucial void.

During the 1980s, a time when gay sex was largely marginalized, Circus of Books served as an oasis for queer people. The store's West Hollywood location was adjacent to Vaseline Alley, a legendary gay cruising spot (cruising was the widespread practice of searching out other LGBT people in public for sex before apps like Grindr existed). Featuring interviews with family members, porn actors, former employees, and clients, Mason's documentary is a deep-dive on the small business's large impact.

With the rise of internet porn and dating apps, stores like Circus of Books have become financially unfeasible to maintain. In August 2016, Karen and Barry closed their Silver Lake location and then two and a half years later, shut down their West Hollywood store. Living in New York City at the time, Mason moved back to Los Angeles when her mother informed her of what was going to happen. She said. "It's a poignant moment in any business's history when it closes. For me, part of the power of the film is that you're watching a business close."

Mason refers to the store as the family's "Shanda" — a yiddish word for shame.

In 1982, her parents caught wind that a West Hollywood porn store was on its last legs and sensed a business opportunity. What followed were decades of struggling to reconcile their lives in a conservative Jewish community with their jobs owning and running a queer bookstore.

"My mom is that conflicted conservative person who felt like being in the sex business was just something she had to do and she would have preferred to do something that she could actually tell people about. So living with a secret for so many years was her struggle and I, as somebody that feels very strongly that people in the sex business should not be marginalized, I almost have an advocacy for people in the sex industry," Mason told Insider.

Through filming "Circus of Books," Mason learned about how that sense of secrecy manifested in other aspects of her family's lives. Even though her parents were embedded in the queer sex industry her brother Josh struggled to come out to his family as gay. And when her parents faced obscenity charges from the F.B.I., her parents hid it from the children. "It was eye opening to realize while interviewing both of them that we all three were so in the dark," she recalled.

For Mason, Circus of Books was a unique introduction to the LGBTQ scene.

She befriended many of the gay men who worked there and then witnessed up-close the devastation of the AIDS pandemic. Her documentary is a tribute to the friends she lost.

"I remember these fabulous, wonderful characters who were the clerks and who were the various people that my parents worked with. And then they would start to die," Mason said. "I felt heartbroken because these were just people I thought were cool and interesting, and only years later did I realize they were 20 to 25." Many of these men were disavowed by their own parents and often, the Masons were the closest thing they had to family.

According to Mason, though her mother has come a long way in terms of accepting her son's sexuality and is now active in PFLAG, she still struggles with relinquishing her shame about the past. She was initially wary of her daughter making a documentary about Circus of Books, claiming that more visible leaders of the LGBTQ movement deserved to be the focus of a film.

"My mom took this very obvious position, 'well, you should focus on people that really did the good work. I just did this little thing in the shadows,'" Mason recalled. "But what is great about documentary filmmaking is that we have the opportunity to focus on the shadows and the little people."

Mason hopes that the documentary's reception can help her parents realize that they hold a significant place in queer history. After watching a screening, her mom had some complaints but was generally supportive. "They've come around to just recognizing, at the very least, that the store was really important and that they did do something — even if they don't realize or even if they didn't set out to do it — that had some positive value," Mason said.

Towards the end of the film, Ben, a former employee, tells Mason some candid wisdom during his last day at work. "The past will never come back and unless you're willing to invest in the future, there's no use trying to exist anymore." As more iconic stores close due to gentrification and the current economic crisis, it's unclear how they can be aptly replaced in a digital future.

This past January, Chi Chi LaRue, a drag queen and porn director, reopened Circus of Books' West Hollywood location as Chi Chi LaRue's Circus — an art gallery and upscale sex toy store. Even if the space was passed down to a queer sex industry veteran, it's nearly impossible to recreate the distinct charm of a decades-old establishment oozing with nostalgia.

When Insider asked Mason if she had any advice for queer establishments that are now facing a similar fate to Circus of Books, she said. "If you have an iconic, legendary business, the community deserves knowing about it [closing] in advance. The worst thing is if it just closes and people find out afterward, and I think Circus of Books allowed the community an opportunity to mourn."

"Circus of Books" will be available for streaming on Netflix on April 22nd.

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