GLR May-June 2026

Rachel Mason and the Cinematic Culturespace ARTIST’S PROFILE

P HIL T ARLEY I N OCTOBER 1990, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the severed head of gay porn star Billy London was found in a dumpster in an alley behind Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. A generation of queer lives was being erased, and so were its crimes. In the new documentary My Brother’s Killer , director Rachel Mason returns to this unresolved violence not as a conventional true-crime filmmaker but as a cultural ar chaeologist. As in her earlier film Circus of Books (2019), Mason situates private trauma within public history, insisting that queer lives and queer deaths must be read through the political conditions of queer his tory. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed in both those documentaries, and I was at tacked by Billy London’s killer and barely escaped to tell the tale on camera.) On a warm February afternoon, Rachel and I met at my West Hollywood home to talk about her filmmaking. Phil Tarley: Both of your documentaries are rooted in Los Angeles. How does queer L.A. influence your work? Rachel Mason: I don’t think LA often gets the attention it deserves. We hear about Stonewall and New York. In Circus of Books , I wanted to set the record straight about the struggle here in L.A. The Black Cat bar erupted in the fight for gay rights years before Stonewall. It was before there was “LGBT.” Before “queer” … it was a world full of gays. I’ve always felt very much tied to that community because my parents’ gay porn store was at the center of that L.A. culture. Gay men were dying from AIDS, and violent homophobic as saults were everywhere. PT: I think of you as an anthropological filmmaker who thoroughly excavates your subject matter. Is that the kind of filmmak ing you studied at Yale? RM: When I took a gay and lesbian history class at Yale, Jonathan D. Katz was the pro fessor. I told him my parents owned Circus of Books; I thought it was just a funny thing to say. He said: “Rachel, you realize there is potent gay history in pornography.” I didn’t know that. Jonathan Katz told me there is no gay cinematic history above ground. Everything is underground. So that is where the culture is. That is how I came to understand the value of adult videos and films in the gay world. In the straight world, you have main

stream Hollywood stuff. You have guys mak ing out with girls. You and I were talking about Pleasure Beach (1983), a seminal ’80s porn film. That movie was the first time you saw a real love story between men. Gay pornography is an important cultural artifact. PT: Why include archival footage of Queer Nation in My Brother’s Killer ? RM: To understand the context of Billy London’s death, we really had to situate it in the culture and history of the time. A gay man in 1990 being murdered is what we were dealing with in this film. I wanted to make sure we understood what the gay community was doing in that period. The Queer Nation footage showed the commu

who felt your parents’ porn store was a cen tral part of their lives. In My Brother’s Killer you look at the gay porn demimonde not as a lurid niche but as a social ecosys tem shaped by marginalization, desire, sur vival, and exposure to extreme risk. RM: Those were rough times. I wanted to showthat. PT: Were there any lesbian filmmakers who influenced you? RM: I always loved Kimberly Peirce’s film Boys Don’t Cry (1999). Hilary Swank won an Oscar for it, playing Brandon Teena, who was a trans man at the time. Although I don’t know if they were even using that word, because he was dressing as a man, though he was female. I thought it was a re ally poignant film. Lesbian films… I will say this: I feel I am much more a part of the gay man’s world. When I made Circus of Books , I remember listening to a podcast by some lesbians who felt they weren’t well represented. I had this feeling: well, I’m sorry, but this really was a gay man’s space. You know, it’s all about dicks. PT: It’s interesting you brought up trans. How has living with your life partner, Buck Angel, a trans man, influenced your work? RM: Well, what’s cool about Buck is that he sees everything from a unique vantage point. Not only is he a trans man, but he’s also someone who was deeply involved in the gay male porn world, making gay porn for mostly men. And yet he was also in the lesbian world before that as a butch lesbian. And so, I see him now in this space of com municating with a global audience, where queer acceptance has opened the floodgates for a wide mainstream audience to discuss things that used to be underground. And Buck was as underground a figure as there ever was. Even when I met him, he was still, in my mind, much more part of the porn world. PT: Bruce LaBruce appears in your pro duction credits. His work occupies a volatile territory between pornography, avant-garde cinema, and political provoca tion. What does his presence mean within the æsthetic architecture of your film? RM: If there’s a person who defines an an thropologist of the subculture, even if it’s in fiction, it’s Bruce LaBruce. For My Brother’s Killer , Bruce allowed us to use footage from Hustler White (1999), includ ing scenes he had filmed inside our Circus of Books store. Billy London’s killer, Dara lyn Madden [as he was called at the

nity fighting back … and I think that’s an empowering message for today. You see a marginalized community not willing to roll over when things aren’t going well. PT: The subtitle of your movie is “An at tack on one of us is an attack on all of us.” RM: Exactly. Dion Labriola, co-producer and editor of My Brother’s Killer , reminded me that this is the same present-day narrative and messaging used by NATO. It’s part of our global politics. It’s why we help Ukraine. It was the way Queer Nation operated. PT: In Circus of Books , you excavate the gay porn subculture as a bittersweet life and-times exploration of all the gay men

May–June 2026

53