More Winning: Gay Porn Bookstore Closes Down in West Hollywood

Hailey Branson-Potts, the shallow El Segundo Times propagandist with an Anti-Semitic mentor, wrote another glowing article about a trashy dive in West Hollywood. This article was a hagiography of an adult gay bookstore in the Homosexual capital of Southern California.

Is it any surprise that the El Segundo, or rather Los Angeles Times is going bust?

How can anyone look at an adult bookstore and consider it any kind of legacy? A city which awards a porn-star, hard-up slut like Stormy Daniels the Key to the City, the same municipality


These grandparents sold gay porn for decades and almost went to prison. Now, they are calling it quits

For 37 years, the couple — now septuagenarian grandparents — have run Circus of Books, a West Hollywood bookstore that sold gay and straight nudie magazines, hardcore pornographic films and sex toys, as well as international newspapers and classic literary titles.

“I always assumed that we would end up doing something else,” Karen said. “We don’t know anything, really.”

The Santa Monica Boulevard store gained legendary status in Southern California’s LGBTQ community as a place where people could peruse gay erotica or meet other gay people, hanging out in a place free from homophobia.

This is the best that the LA Times can come up with.

Hailey Branson is a narrowminded bigot, she has no real skills as a journalist, and her mentor was a notorious anti-Semite who said "The Jews should get the hell out of Palestine."

Is this really journalism?

And now she takes time to write about a gay bookstore which featured salacious, disturbing material.

I hope that the good doctor from South Africa is not paying this trash reporter.

Over the years, Circus of Books has survived an FBI raid, federal obscenity charges and complaints from law enforcement who said the store attracted prostitution and other criminal elements. It remained open during the AIDS crisis, when numerous employees died.

Does anyone not see the problem with all this LGBT nonsense now? This is beyond unreal.

Look at all the health, all the legal problems associated with this death-stye

But it could not survive Amazon.

Strangled by the internet — where pornography and dating apps abound — Circus of Books will close for good Saturday.

That's a good sign, I guess. It's too bad that innovation is making it even easier to poison their minds, but that's the reality, the outcome which comes with liberty. Allowing people to make choices about what they do with their time, with their money means allowing people to make poor decisions.

“A lot of people are sorry to see it go, grateful it’s been there all this time,” Karen said. “And as we’re closing, people are saying, ‘You know, this store saved my life.’ ”

"A lot of people", like whom?

When the Masons started out in the early 1980s, “Circus of Books and the gay bars were places where people would go to meet, to find each other,” said West Hollywood Mayor John Duran, who is gay. “There was no Grindr or Scruff or Tinder. If you wanted to find community, you had to go out and seek it.”

This is the same mayor slammed with a host of same-sex #MeToo issues. Do we really want this guy talking to us about finding community? This guy undermines community. This is beyond unreal.

For many customers, the gay erotica was revolutionary, he said.

“It’s not like any of us got this through sex ed or at home with Mom and Dad,” Duran said. “We had to learn.”

Learn what? How to destroy your body? How to give into a false sense of entitlement? How to fall for a lie which corrupted the civil rights movement? I cannot believe any mainstream newspaper would print this trash.

Of course, the LA Times is not really that mainstream anymore, is it?

In the 1970s, Barry made a decent living selling accessories he’d invented for dialysis machines until the cost of medical malpractice insurance became too much.

Liberalism at work.

After Karen, who had worked as a journalist, spotted a newspaper ad seeking magazine distributors for Larry Flynt — the publisher of Hustler and Chic — Barry started driving around to liquor stores and newsstands, taking orders.

Ugh. How shameful is this? Someone would sell their soul, their integrity just to make a buck. No wonder the LA Times resorts to writing such a high-profile article for a low-brow business.

Karen did deliveries. She was pregnant at the time, so she hired unemployed musicians — she preferred drummers, who always seemed the most reliable — to help with heavy lifting.

This is another trademark, hallmark, watermark of Branson. She has no real skillset, and she spends time writing 

One West Hollywood store, Book Circus, ordered 600 gay titles, including Blueboy and Honcho, each month and instantly sold out. “I’d have to fill the whole truck up just to fill those titles,” Barry said. Customers were so glad when the magazines arrived, “they would come out front and help me unload it.”

The Masons eventually learned the bookstore’s owner, who had fallen behind on magazine payments, was being evicted. Barry made a deal with the property manager: He’d pay half the man’s $1,400 monthly rent until he was evicted if the Masons could take over the lease afterward.

Interesting. The Gay Bookstore was selling lots of stuff, but the original owner couldn't pay all the bills.

The couple kept the staff and changed the name to Circus of Books. Along with the pornography, they sold obscure novels from LGBTQ authors, as well as science fiction books, foreign newspapers, even Bibles.

They sold Bibles. OK. I wonder how many they actually sold!

Gay-themed magazines played an important role in assuring people they weren’t alone at a time when homosexuality was taboo, said Joseph Hawkins, director of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC.

I think that the fact that this behavior has not been restored as taboo is creating much of the problems in our culture, in our society. Why do local newspapers want to continue promoting this "gay ideal", anyway?  Who are the editors of the LA Times trying to help out here?

For decades, gay magazines — including ONE, the non-pornographic magazine for which the archive is named — that were sold at newsstands in big cities were obscured behind a tarp or curtain and sold alongside bawdy straight magazines, even if the gay periodicals had no nude pictures.

The whole thing is illicit.

“There was just enough space to edge in and look, and there were porn magazines for the straight men and the gay men. Everybody was in there,” Hawkins said. “Sometimes the men in there looking at straight erotica would see you looking at a gay-oriented magazine and get upset.

This is what happens when social justice warriors turn into so-called "journalists." This stuff is a flaming crock on so many levels, I have no idea where to start in exposing this stuff. Do these university "educated" types really think that they are going to change the world, change its perceptions about the uneven drudgery that is liberal ideology?

They are pleasing themselves, but they are educating no one and they are not really changing minds. This insanity must be pushed aside at all costs. I cannot wait to see the El Segundo Times crash and burn. This is unreal.

“You never had a sense of safety. You’d worry there was a vice officer in there who would arrest you for looking at the magazines. ... The place was selling the magazine, but you weren’t allowed to look at it.”

Rachel Mason said that when she was growing up, her parents were much more strict than her friends’. She and her two brothers had to get straight A’s. They weren’t allowed to watch TV. They had to go to synagogue with their mother.

Oh boy! Make sure the kids go to schul and synagogue, and don't let them read the smut that the parents were peddling. Wow! The hypocrisy should have gotten more coverage than the actual sale of the trash itself.

“I was this little rebel, and what I didn’t know was that they were outlaws in their own way,” she said. “They were just so good at this balancing act that we had no clue about it. I was fighting with my mom about my hair color … and they were actually dealing in hardcore videos.”

Rachel, 40, an artist and musician, is making a documentary about her parents’ shop, which will debut on the film festival circuit this spring. It wasn’t until she started making the film that she realized how revered Karen and Barry were in the LGBTQ community.

"Revered", a term which implies divine respect and autthority.

Oh, since the owners of this adult bookstore were Jewish, I wonder if Hailey bothered to reveal that her mentor hated Jews and hated Israel? I wonder if her subjects would have consented to an interview and article expose?

“This store represents a time capsule of a different era … when being queer was really underground,” she said. “It was truly a hidden culture.”

Let's Make Queer Underground Again!

Rachel and her brothers sometimes sneaked into the pornography section to giggle at the movie covers until their mom yelled at them to get out. In the 1980s, young Rachel noticed that her parents’ clerks kept disappearing.

They were dying of AIDS.

That above paragraph is so poorly written. So, we go from reading about the kids' sneaking into the pornography section to learn that the bookstore clerks were dying. Huh?

“Somebody I just met would be dead the next week, then another person and another person … as a kid, I didn’t have any perception that that was unusual.

“They were extraordinary young guys who I looked up to.”

Seriously? Why?

If employees felt well enough to work, the Masons encouraged them to come in so they could have some normalcy. If they needed public assistance to pay for expensive medication, the couple would pay them off the books in cash so they could keep unemployment benefits. It was the only time, Karen said, she ever broke the rules.

Wow! So these bookstore owners were thieves and frauds, and they were helping homosexuals steal and defraud the government of the state of California!

“They were just so young,” Karen said, sighing. “It just — um — they shouldn’t have died.”

They wouldn't have died if these old fools were not promoting the very lifestyle which killed them. This is a sickening report, to say the least.

The Masons by that time had bought the building, which had several apartments upstairs, and their tenants were dying, too. Many were estranged from their families.

“A lot of parents wouldn’t come to get their things or come to their funerals,” Barry said.

“And sometimes,” Karen said, “I would get a call from a mother. ‘Tell me about my son.’ Where were you, lady? I had nothing to say to parents like that.”

At its peak, Circus of Books had three locations. A short-lived Sherman Oaks store closed in the late 1990s after the city ordered it to stop selling porn because it was too close to an elementary school. The Silver Lake shop closed in 2016 amid declining sales.

How about that? These awful parents, the owners of this perverse book store, were trying to sell their garish goods near elementary school children. That is hideous!

The West Hollywood store had its share of drama. The alleyway behind it was a well-known gay cruising spot, and residents and sheriff’s deputies said the 24-hour bookstore attracted prostitutes and drug dealers.

Oh, more lawlessness. And of course, Hailey Branson celebrates it.

In 1989, the city ordered the store to close daily from 2 to 6 a.m. Karen told The Times then that they were being used as a scapegoat for a problem they didn’t create.

"The hustlers are around the building like roaches,” she said at the time, “and we've tried to get rid of them.”

No you didn't! Karen and her corrupt crew depended on their business. They helped it to thrive!

In the early 1990s, an employee shipped several gay and straight pornographic VHS tapes — including “Licorice Twists,” “Latex Slaves Discipline” and “The Best of Bruce Seven, Vol. 1” — to a customer in Pennsylvania’s Lebanon County.

But it was a sting. The Masons were indicted on federal charges of interstate transportation of obscene materials, and the FBI raided their warehouse, carrying guns.

“They were looking for a copy of what was shipped,” Barry said, “a girly title, and all of them, every time they’d pull out a box they’d laugh at the titles.”

After years of litigation, the Masons avoided jail time by agreeing to a pretrial diversion program and a $20,000 fine. For about a year, Barry had to report to federal court once a month to show he was still working and not committing any crimes. Federal investigators, he said, later mailed back the tapes they’d taken as evidence.

Lol!

Karen, who gets a bit embarrassed when talking about the pornography, said she’d never watched any of the films. It all seems kind of boring, she said with a shrug.

How would she know? Why would she stay mired in the business for so long if she was so embarrassed by all of it?

In her spare basement office, Karen still keeps contacts on a Rolodex. She also keeps two sketches done by her children hanging above her desk.

One is a portrait of Mother Teresa. The other is a drawing of a frail man with an oxygen tube in his nose. They’re a reminder, she said, that everything in life is finite.

Huh?

Final Reflection

It's a good thing that the gay porn bookstore "Circus of Books" is gone. It's sad, however, that the LA Times, or El Segundo Times, or whatever anyone wants to call them, resorted to a second-rate propagandist to write such a telling, glowing report about this trashy store.

Notice that they broke a number of laws, and notice also that they spent more time promoting illicit materials for the public while shaming and steering away their children from the very smut they were pushing onto the general public.

Someone please explain to me why anyone would glory in this sad, sordid tale?

We have Hailey Branson-Potts, a veiled Anti-Semite (Since she refuses to disavow her bigoted mentor Helen Thomas) who routinely reports nice things about LGBT everything, while the real news is ignored or skipped over. She has a problem with conservatives, and with minorities who support President Trump.

She also has issues with anything that has to do with facts and pro-family interests. She went to great lengths to point out that MassResistance has been unjustly smeared as a "hate group" because of the discredited SPLC.

When does this nonsense end?

But back to this story ...

Isn't it incredible how all the reporting about the homosexuals who died because of AIDS is treated almost as an afterthought? The reporter refuses to draw the line between the high-risk behaviors and the higher incidence of disease, dysfunction, death. What kind of journalism is this?

It's gotcha, clickbait journalism, nothing more. Incidentally enough, this tragic-comic reporting is good news in some sense, since one more smutty bookstore is out of business, and the most left-wing reporter out there could not dress it up nicely.