Circus of Books

Mom.

Mom, turn around!

Mom, turn around! You're on Totally Hidden Video!

Say hi. Scream!

We've got a house full of company. Can we call you back? Okay.

Hello. What's your name, sir?

"You're on Candid Camera."

Look at that little camera hidden in that corner behind the cabinet.

-Aren't you too close right now? -Yes, that's a camera.

-I'm not focused, Rachel. - Scream.

Five cans of water?! Holy-moly!

Five cans of water.

Rachel, this is gonna be such a boring tape,

watching somebody put five cans of water in a pitcher.

Okay, Mom, Dad, can you introduce yourselves?

- You start. - Okay.

So, I'm Karen Mason.

I'm Barry Mason.

And we own Circus of Books, since 1982,

so 33 years ago.

Which is a long time to do anything.

Can you say what the Circus of Books is?

All right. So, Josh, can you describe our family for me?

Like, what are Mom and Dad like?

Um...

I think our family--

There's a level of conventionality in our family. I think, um...

we're a normal, tight-knit family.

I just mean to take us.

Hey, Micah, stop it. Micah! Come on.

We were striving for the perfect family look.

Micah, you moved.

Mom, she's definitely the alpha woman

but still quite soft around the edges.

Do it again.

She is strong-willed,

and she goes for what she wants with force.

How would you describe Dad?

Don't bang into the bars.

Dad is one of the few people whose default state is happiness.

He's just kind of a happy guy.

What does the red light in this thing mean?

-Daddy, can I go in here? - Yeah.

Daddy!

The description is always,

"Look for the bald guy with a smile on his face,"

whenever he was lost in a shopping mall.

It was definitely a good cop/bad cop duo.

You know, here I was, this, uh...

I would never call myself a soccer mom,

but I was certainly a working mother with three children.

We didn't want them to know what we did at all,

because we thought maybe people wouldn't, like, play with them.

I think that's a very tough piñata.

We never talked about it.

It was just known that's how the family worked.

You don't talk about family business in the family.

If anyone asked us what our parents did,

the official answer was, "Run a bookstore."

"We own a bookstore."

That's what you tell people.

There were times we had to get to the store,

'cause Mom was driving us home and needed to stop by.

We were under strict instructions to stare down at the ground

the entire time we were passing through certain areas of the store.

"Don't look around. Look at the floor."

But obviously...

you know, wandering eyes.

There was one time I found a VHS tape

in the back of Mom's car,

and I grabbed it, and hid it, and waited for months.

Finally, everybody was out of the house,

and I run to my hiding place, and I pull out this tape...

and it turns out it was a Beta, and I couldn't watch it.

So, Circus of Books is a bookstore

and a hardcore gay, adult business.

I would always see Circus of Books,

and I thought it was just... a bookstore...

with a circus theme.

And I went in and realized

that it was so much more than just a regular bookstore.

It had this whole section that was just, like, porn,

P-O-R-N, you know.

It was great.

A purveyor of gourmet sexual material for every pervert in America,

that was Circus bookstore's claim to fame.

It made all these men comfortable exploring their own sexuality.

Circus of Books was a safe place to find other gays.

There was cruising going on in the book stacks.

It was the center of the gay universe in that neighborhood.

A regular feature here on 2 on the Town is to take a look

at some of the famous and infamous streets of Southern California.

And tonight, Lou Lauren takes us along with him

to Santa Monica Boulevard.

This is the face of Santa Monica Boulevard

that is familiar to most outsiders.

But the street also has a private side,

perceived by outsiders only if it dawns on them

that almost all of the people they see here are men.

In the first year I moved to Los Angeles,

I found a place that was accepting.

West Hollywood was mainly very young, gay people,

and it was called Boystown.

Back then, if you were out, you were an outlaw,

and you did outlandish things, you know?

That whole, like, toe-tapping, and cruising,

and like, bandannas and flagging...

People don't say, "Well, maybe I'd better get into a corner.

My boss might see me here"?

No, no, I think gay liberation is here, and there's no problem at all.

My name is Alexei Romanoff,

and I happen to be one of the last people who are still alive

from the demonstration at the Black Cat.

On New Year's Eve, 1966,

there were police raids on two of the bars.

Two or three seconds after midnight,

after the song "Auld Lang Syne" was playing at the Black Cat,

the police started to arrest people who were kissing.

They were afraid,

because if they got outed, they could lose their job,

lose their homes.

From that incident, came demonstrations against police brutality

outside of the oldest gay bars in Los Angeles,

the Black Cat and the New Faces.

It was the largest demonstration in the country at the time,

and it was two and a half years before Stonewall.

The New Faces became the Circus of Books.

That bookstore was really important,

because there was literature in them that had to do with our lives.

I mean, we were the unspoken, hidden people

that you never talked about because they were disgusting.

I can't even explain how different it was.

To be a homo was unspeakable, basically.

Porn has always had a place in the gay community,

because, you know, we didn't see anything like that.

To see men, you know, naked and unafraid...

that gave us a lot of pride.

Circus of Books was my first glimpse

into the fact that I wasn't alone as a gay person.

Being gay back then was not easy,

and this bookstore, you know,

it kept me safe. It kept me out of harm's way.

How are the sales today?

They're on the slow side.

Then up.

Like every day, huh?

Oh, looks like some of the VHS might have sold, huh?

-Yeah. - Did it?

-Yep. -Somewhat, yeah.

So, I mean, I just see this this morning.

Somebody brought in straight VHS tapes, and these are in really good condition.

I don't know who's gonna buy the straight VHS tapes,

but we didn't pay anything.

We traded for books that we sell for a dollar.

These are pills. These are called cock rings.

Why is this going over there?

I don't know why this is going over there.

All right.

We got a report of a rat.

So one of the employees this morning happened to see it

way back here where there is no food, but we just want to catch it

before he decides to go up front and grab some of our snacks.

Well, the front of the store has our most merchandise.

So this guy here, Handjobs magazine, just stopped publishing.

Now, he does organic chicken farming.

So when I order from him, we catch up on his chickens.

Okay, so this is our adult section.

Famous.

So, this is one of our best sections of all.

This is called "Previously Viewed,"

and these are...

hardcore gay DVDs

that customers bought from us over the years.

I don't know that this is one of the really good ones.

For a while, we were just doing buy-one-get-one-free with this sale.

It's called Nude and Rude, directed by Carl Stanyon.

But even at $3.95,

they're not flying off the shelves.

Some days, I go to work,

and I feel like I'm just moving the deckchairs on the Titanic.

I take a seven-dollar movie and reduce it to three dollars,

and I move it from this side of the wall to that side of the wall.

We're just an aging, ailing business.

She set off to be a journalist,

so she did not set off to go chart a different course.

But I guess circumstances changed her from that path.

But if you look at Mom's early reporting,

she interviewed Larry Flynt. She wrote about smut raids in bookstores.

-Really? - Yes.

-That was her early reporting? -Yes.

I had no idea.

Me neither until I found her articles.

Oh, this was our little, um...

staff in Dayton.

Whoa! You dressed kind of sexy actually.

Yeah, I did. I had a nice figure. Look at that.

Whoa!

What?

- Yeah. - What?

See, but, Rachel, what are you gonna do with stuff like this?