During the porn industry’s gold rush days, the home video revolution of the 1980s, Adam & Eve’s fortunes grew. Harvey, who jokes of being a “basically lazy” and distracted manager, was meanwhile mainly focused on nonprofit work. “By the time I started paying attention to the company,” he recalls, its porn “had gone a little too far.” An employee flagged a rape scene in a movie called A Dirty Western in a memo that Harvey quotes from memory: “‘I don’t think we should be selling this type of material. It’s violent. It goes against everything that we’re hearing in terms of women’s rights and women’s dignity.’ At that point, we did a little soul searching. In the first place, we said ‘No rape, period.’”

Shortly thereafter, law-enforcement authorities put Adam & Eve in the crosshairs. Nine more felony indictments of PHE’s “disseminating obscenity” followed a raid of the company’s headquarters in 1986, by 37 officers, including federal agents with guns. Much of Harvey’s career had played out in the law’s long shadow—in its first years, his mail-order business was technically illegal, as condoms were then classified as obscene by obsolete and rarely-enforced statutes—and Harvey, who became an astute amateur First Amendment scholar, refused to back down. The ensuing eight-year legal battle, detailed in Harvey’s excellent book, The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam & Eve (one of three nonfiction titles he has authored), ended with a not-guilty verdict.

Yet partly in response to these troubles, Adam & Eve called on lawyers and sex therapists to help formalize its acceptability standards. When he describes these standards, Harvey’s characteristic self-effacement yields to plainspoken pride: “I’m extremely pleased with our contribution to making sex more positive, toward improving the standards in the industry, which we do, because as a major purchaser of mainstream material, a lot of the producers keep our standards in mind.” Joy King, a porn industry veteran who serves as vice president of special projects at Wicked Pictures (a leading producer of films catering primarily to women and couples), says these standards “had a pretty profound impact on the industry. Specifically, here at Wicked Pictures, we go to great lengths to make sure that our product will pass the scrutiny of the review.”

Independent sex therapists still help oversee Adam & Eve’s reviews; most are done internally by PHE employees who want to make extra money. The stringent prohibitions that Harvey describes regard violence and coercion scenarios that are based on power imbalances. Reviewers, however, say that company standards have relaxed in recent years. “Everything is consensual, but these are—a lot of things are—in a real gray area,” says Chad Davis, a marketing director at Adam & Eve, who oversees the internal review process.

James Ilsley, who heads the company’s gay porn division, noticed last year that, among visitors to the Adam Male website, the most popular search term (entered by 88% of those who entered any search term) was “bareback,” slang for unprotected anal-sex. The number was so compelling that the company began selling bareback videos, which spiked both sales and web traffic. According to William Alston, Adam Male’s marketing coordinator, the sales yield of any given catalogue page jumps roughly 300% if a bareback DVD appears there.

Informed of this, Harvey purses his lips and says, “That’s a little depressing.” which, after all his talk of the importance of encouraging “healthy” sex may seem a feckless understatement. One might even be forgiven for thinking that the distance between Phil Harvey’s stated standards and the contents of some of Adam & Eve’s products smacks of hypocrisy—until you understand how much the porn-king philanthropist has in common with Ronald Reagan.

When Harvey left Harvard in 1961, he says, “I was very idealistic. I still am. You want to leave things a little better off than you found them.”

He’s since put the idealism to hard work, noting, however, that he’s “lowered [his] sights a lot…and changed views on a great many things.”

The liberal in winter has become a libertarian. Deeply influenced by Milton Friedman’s popularizing Newsweek column and television series Free to Choose in the 1980s, Harvey is a major donor to the Cato Institute. “People should be free, and they should be responsible” is one of his maxims. “You shouldn’t tell them what they should pay their babysitters or what kind of porn to watch. This is one of the reasons I have a grudging respect for Reagan, despite the campaign his administration waged against porn.” At this juncture, the Robin Hood analogy breaks down—a point that Harvey introduces with an anecdote about the American advertising tycoon and diplomat Chester Bowles, who served as an official in the administrations of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. The two became friendly in India, where Bowles was U.S. Ambassador. In his memoirs, Harvey says, Bowles “dismissed his commercial career with barely a thought. He found it to be, if not an embarrassment, just a means to an end. I don’t feel that. Not at all.”

Adam & Eve, Harvey makes clear, is no less meaningful, less good, less worthy than his nonprofit work. “The standard cliché is that commercial for-profit activity is not perceived as socially useful,” he says, impatiently, “even though that’s the source of all our wealth, that makes all the other things possible.” DKT provides opportunities for people to direct the effects of their sexual behavior; Adam & Eve gives customers resources for exploring the possibilities of pleasure. The consistency running between Phil Harvey’s jobs is his determination to give people the freedom to act in their own best interest.

The mazy halls of PHE headquarters contain an almost Borgesian repository of documents, tableaux, and characters illustrating this principle—and the various results of its realization. Outside the lunch room, letters from customers are thumbtacked to a bulletin board. “Dear Mr. Harvey,” one begins, from a man who many years ago ordered lingerie for his wife. He returned the lingerie because it was the wrong size, but kept the free vibrator that was included with his order. The vibrator, he recalls, “was a good fit,” and reinvigorated their sex life. “We did later divorce,” the letter concludes, “but we had good sex till the end.” Another letter, in a loopy script on Hallmark stationery, confides to “Dear Adam and Eve” that “my sweetheart wants to bring extra people into our sex life. I don’t think I can do that. Not knowing what else to do, I hope that your products can help us.”

Down the hall, Maurice “Pebbles” Southern takes a break from filling orders in the warehouse. “I never worked in a place like this before,” the 24-year-old smiles. “They leave you alone to do your work, and then they always find a way to praise you. And nobody ever gives me trouble.” That sentiment is not, one ventures to guess, one often expressed by many other female-to-male transsexuals in rural North Carolina.

Upstairs, the triptych of ephemera taped on the glass wall of one man’s cubicle is harder to interpret, but its strange boldness is impossible to forget: a snapshot of the man, posed cheek-to-cheek with his girlfriend; a close-up video-screen grab of a spurt of ejaculate arcing through the air; and a Christmas card depicting a candle shining in the window of a cabin on a snowy hill. How, exactly, healthy sex might be defined remains a durable mystery to Harvey himself, who admits, “I’m not so far along that I don’t smile when I remember Woody Allen’s answer when he was asked, ‘Is sex dirty?’ and he said, ‘Only if it’s done right.’ We want it to be dirty on some level.” With an actor’s timing, he makes eye contact, and, after a beat, adds “There’s your conflict, and it’s eternal.”

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