Circus of Books
Ryan Murphy, Executive Producer; Rachel Mason, Director/Screenwriter
Netflix, 2019

Circus of Books, available on Netflix, is a documentary about Barry and Karen Mason, a wholesome, friendly straight couple who have made a career out of selling hard-core gay porn.

The documentary takes viewers through the story of how Barry and Karen left respective careers in cinematic special effects and journalism to run their L.A. business, a shop called Circus of Books.

The film is made by their daughter, which shapes the narrative arc into a story about their family dynamics. Karen in particular has an astute business acumen, but struggles to square the store’s success with her identity as a pious Jewish woman.

For example, she lived in fear that her fellow synagogue congregants would learn what she did for a living. The children were trained to respond to any questions about their parents’ occupations with, “They run a bookstore.” The family tension is heightened when one of their sons comes out to them as gay. One might expect that, after dealing in hard-core gay erotica for so long, the couple wouldn’t bat an eye. On the contrary, the documentary highlights a duality which may be familiar to Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s readers: being able to tolerate certain identities and lifestyles among other people but having great difficulty accepting them in one’s own family.