We had the great pleasure of sitting down with Kathryn Robson to talk about her work on the documentary, Circus of Books. Kathryn explains what this story meant in the LGBTQ community, where it was unfolding in the 70s and 80s, and how it illuminates the times we are living in now.
Congratulations on your Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for the Netflix documentary, Circus of Books. Please tell us what drew you to the story of Karen and Barry Mason.
Thank you so much! The Mason’s story is so rich and vibrant, and Karen and Barry are such funny, compelling people it was impossible not to be drawn to it. When I first met Rachel (Karen and Barry’s daughter), all I knew was that she was making a documentary about her parents’ iconic gay porn store, Circus of Books. I knew of the stores but didn’t know anything about the backstory. She started telling me about her family life; how her mother was very religious and they had kept the store a secret not just from friends, but from her and her brothers as well. And then she told me they had faced this harrowing federal prosecution on obscenity charges. I had done my thesis on a pornography-related topic (The Hetero Female Use of Online Porn) and was well-versed in how obscenity laws had long been used to target the LGBTQ community, so I felt there was something I could bring to the film. And Rachel and I had a great connection right out the gate. Everything really aligned and it felt kind of fated.
Besides illuminating the personal challenges that the Masons had to face, can you talk a bit about the external challenges brought on by the time period?
Yeah, it was a really unique moment for the LGBTQ community and for the porn industry. You had this confluence of things happening; the sexual revolution and the early pride movements in the 1970s meant that LGBTQ people could find a safe haven for the first time in places like West Hollywood. And stores like Circus of Books were central to that. They were safe spaces where gay people could form connections and community. But they were still targeted by police and anti-gay movements. And then in the 80s, you had this political swing to the right with the moral majority movement and Reagan’s focus on “obscenity,” which, as I said, historically had been used in this semi-veiled way to target LGBTQ communities. There were a lot of risks that both the gay community and Karen and Barry as purveyors of gay porn were facing. There was a patchwork of state laws; porn was legal in some states, illegal in others (much the same as marijuana laws in the US today). Federal authorities were looking for any potential misstep, and in some cases were setting up sting operations to deliberately entrap porn distributors. And that’s what happened to the Masons.
Throughout all this, you had the growing HIV/AIDs crisis, which was just an absolute horror for the gay community. So little was known early on and people were dying in masses and the federal government was doing next to nothing. I mean, this didn’t make it into the film, but we have audio of Reagan’s press secretary laughing when a journalist asked him about how the government planned to respond to this health crisis. It’s so heartbreakingly cruel. And Karen and Barry were witnessing this—watching these healthy, vibrant young men get sick and die within weeks, and they couldn’t stand for it. They felt compelled to help and respond in whatever way they could. So the time period was unique, but there’s also a lot of parallels between then and what we’re living through today. To me, it was always a story about community and what it means to be an ally for vulnerable people, and we couldn’t have anticipated how much that would resonate with this moment while we were making the film, but I think it really does.
Given the fact that the Masons felt themselves to be living a double life, how difficult was it for them to step out of the shadows and become advocates for the gay community? And how did their advocacy manifest itself?
I think what we show in the film is the transformation the Masons went through from being these quiet advocates in their professional life to becoming very public advocates in their personal life. Karen and Barry didn’t see their work in the store, or even their support for their employees and customers who were dealing with the AIDs crisis, as advocacy. Karen says herself in the film, “I think what we did was small acts of human kindness in a very small way.” They saw themselves as stewards of the store, and as people doing the decent, humane thing. It really wasn’t until they watched the documentary that they began to see the value of their work and what the store really meant to people.
But it is complicated because Karen had this shame around working with pornography and this fear of judgment—which was not an irrational fear by the way! There’s still a lot of stigma. But when their son, Josh, came out, this very careful separation Karen had constructed between her professional life and her personal life collided and she had to reconcile that. And that’s where her personal advocacy really started. Karen and Barry are now deeply embedded in PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) in Los Angeles, and part of that work meant publicly sharing their story of how they responded to Josh coming out and how Karen reconciled these inner conflicts between her love for her son and her religious beliefs. I think they got used to opening up and being more public through that process. And we show in the film how deep their commitment to PFLAG and LGBTQ advocacy is for both of them; I think they really see it as the most important work they do. It’s so inspiring and hopeful to me.
Reviewers praising Circus of Books often refer to its humor. Was it difficult to find the humor in the Masons’ story?
The Masons are just inherently and effortlessly funny people. They don’t try at it, they’re not looking for laughs, but they have this very genuine, unpretentious approach and it’s very charming. So in terms of finding the humor in them, we didn’t have to do much work; it was really just letting them be them and letting the audience see that.
In terms of the humor in the story, I think when I first started piecing it together, my bigger concern was making sure the audience would understand the heart and the significance of what the store and what porn, in general, meant to the gay community. There’s still this tendency to kind of snicker at porn. Maybe it’s a nervous laughter because it’s hard for us to talk openly about sex in our culture. So there’s definitely humor in seeing this sweet, older couple talk about nipple clamps and dildos like it’s no big deal; we’re not used to that! And I wanted to let some of those scenes play out and let the audience enjoy the humor, but I didn’t want to lean too heavily into it where it would feel like schtick. That would be one-note and it would ignore how multi-dimensional their story is because there are also elements of grief and tragedy and danger. That’s what I loved so much about the story. We could take the audience on this emotional ride, present something people thought would just be funny and maybe titillating, and then offer a surprise which is that there is something a lot deeper and more meaningful here.
How much material was available for your research and how did you whittle it down to a one-and-a-half-hour-long documentary?
I did count once and I think there was something like 160 hours of footage. Rachel had started the project many years before I came on and had filmed a lot herself with this small digital camera. She eventually connected with our producer Cynthia Childs, who brought in a great team of DPs and sound mixers and it became a bigger production. And then there was this trove of home movie footage shot by Barry and some of it by Rachel as a kid, and we worked with an incredible archival producer, Rachael Morrison, who helped pull together the archival footage that really set the tone for the era. There was just so much rich material to work with; it was an embarrassment of riches in that sense. But it was a major challenge trying to piece it together and pack it all into 90 minutes. There were so many iterations of the film before we landed on this one.
In terms of my process, I usually start by watching as much of the footage as possible (sometimes in double speed to make the process go a little faster), and I pull selections from that into a sequence. I work with the selects and interview transcripts to figure out the story arc and the key beats and plot that out on a whiteboard, and that becomes the framework for the film. Then I go back in and build out the film scene-by-scene. For archival-heavy sections that rely mainly on interviews to tell the story, I’ll often start with a radio cut (interviews only) and then find the pieces of archival footage and music that bring the story to life. And for vérité scenes, I just move towards the action, the key moments that are revealing something about the subjects or laying groundwork for where I know the story will go. My favorite thing to work with is subtext. So often people will say one thing, but there’s a hidden or paradoxical meaning imbued in what they’re saying that may not even be apparent to them. I love rolling around in complexity and contradiction because I think that’s where the most honest aspects of humanity live; we are complicated creatures and we often hold competing beliefs, or our words and actions don’t seem to fully align. That’s what was so fascinating to me about Circus of Books. There was so much to explore.
As an outsider to the story, how did the direction change once you came on board?
I think it’s always hard for anyone to see what’s interesting about their own life or their own family. There’s no way to have any perspective on it. When Rachel started the project I think she saw it as a historical document about the store. She knew how important it was to the LGBTQ community in LA, and she knew that it was closing and she didn’t want this piece of history to be lost. It took her a little longer to understand that it was really a story about her own family. Having an outside perspective, first from our producer Cynthia Childs, and then from me, was essential, and I think she understood she needed that.
It took us some time to figure out how to situate Rachel in the story. At first, we had this sit-down interview where Rachel was speaking to the camera in the same way as the other film subjects and I realized that wasn’t going to work. We really needed to feel as though we were seeing this story unfold through her lens, that it felt personal and intimate. I brought in more of the handheld stuff Rachel shot where we could hear her behind the camera having these funny and difficult conversations with her mom. We tried using her voice as narration at one point, but it felt a little distant and impersonal. So we decided to film more interviews with her family where we would also film her. The interview with Josh, in particular, was so powerful because you really see this moment of a brother and sister connecting. That couldn’t have happened with anyone else directing and I think that sense of intimacy added so much emotional dimension to the film.
I also wanted to bring a sense of universality. Yes, this is a story about one family and one store, but when you pan out and understand the broader social and political context, there’s so much more resonance for people. I wanted to make sure we situated the events in this moment in history, and created a sense of time and place, and didn’t just rely on interviews and present-day footage of the store closing. When we brought in the archival footage, I think that was a real game-changer for the film. And lastly, it was really important to me to make sure we were both speaking to the LGBTQ community in an honest way, making this experience feel genuine and respectful, but also reaching beyond to a straight community who maybe didn’t think this subject had anything to do with them. That was the beauty of Karen and Barry’s story to me: the message is that we are all directly or indirectly a part of this community and we all have a role to play and a responsibility to stand up for vulnerable people. These are our neighbors, our customers, our co-workers, our friends, our children. I hoped that people could see themselves reflected in the Masons and consider the ways they can be advocates in their own communities, even if it means just interrogating their own beliefs and the ways their values and behaviors don’t always align.
Tell us about the impact you expect the Emmy to have on you and your work.
Well, talk about humbling, it’s my first Emmy nomination and I’m nominated in a category with Spike Jonze and the Beastie Boys and Feras Feyyad, all of the incredible nominees who’ve created amazing work. It’s all just wild to me. I hope it gets more eyes on the film because I really do believe there’s a message in there about community and ally-ship and the importance of connecting in physical spaces that are very poignant for this moment. For my work, I just want to keep telling stories that I think can have an impact, and if the Emmy nomination helps me do that, that sounds great to me!
What do you look for in a film project?
My favorite stories are the ones that allow me to explore complexities and contradictions through subtext. I love being able to present something people think they understand and turn it on its head. It’s what drew me to documentary in the first place. Watching a documentary can be a transformative experience. It can shift paradigms, make people open to seeing the world in a different way, to question their assumptions, open themselves up to perspectives outside their own lived experience. At the end of the day I want my work to generate empathy and understanding, so that’s the ultimate goal. And I think the best way of doing that is exploring the grey areas—not pounding anyone over the head with a message, but letting the messiness of life come through and leaving space for the audience to do some interpretation and meaning-making. It’s a balance because this is also entertainment, but I think of any cultural work as a space where meaning is co-created between the people who created it and the audience that views it. I like making the audience do a little work; I actually think it’s a gift for the audience. So I look for projects that give me the opportunity to do that.
What are you working on now and what drew you to it?
Right now I’m working on a documentary directed by Joey Soloway that explores this experimental housing development they grew up in on the south side of Chicago in the 1960s and 70s. It was sort of an intentional community. Many of the people who lived there saw it as this kind of utopian experiment to create a community that was multi-racial, multi-class, multi-religious. But when we start peeling back the layers, we discover it’s a lot more complicated than that. We’re still in the early stages, but I definitely see it as another opportunity to subvert audience expectations and explore some really complex issues and ideas. And obviously, the opportunity to work with Joey was a no-brainer; they’re such an incredible creative force and so intentional and thoughtful in their work and their advocacy. It’s been such a huge learning opportunity for me.
How can Occhi readers learn more about you and your work?
I’m not much of a social media gal but I do occasionally post updates about my projects on my Instagram (@krobsob). I also have a website that isn’t tended to as much as it probably should be, but you can find all the major news and info about what I’m working on there www.krobsobworks.com
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