Rachel Mason’s excellent 2019 documentary feature Circus of Books took us inside an ordinary mom and pop business with a difference. Starring her own mother and father, Barry and Karen, it told the story of the Masons’ flagship store, a bookshop that was, for a while, at the heart of the West Hollywood gay scene, famous for its vast stock of sex toys, pornographic magazines and DVDs. Mason’s film, however, went deeper than its premise might suggest; alongside the story of Barry’s persecution on obscenity charges by Ronald Reagan’s FBI, the doc also offered a chilling reminder of the lethal effects of the 1980s Aids crisis.
My Brother’s Killer is an unofficial sequel of sorts, and it begins with Mason asking her mother about an unsolved murder that happened around the same time. Billy London (AKA William Arnold Newton), 25, a patron of the store and sometime porn actor,
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