In the Oval Office, the bow-tied, jutting-jawed president sits in his wheelchair, flanked by two voluptuous women in World War II military uniforms. Newsreel cameras whir as the chief executive intones, “It gives me great pleasure to be here today with a contingent of one of America’s best-kept secrets: the magnificent women who give their courage, dedication, and hard work to the American war effort,” all the while groping the best-kept secrets’ ample buttocks. The women smile, though one wonders if it’s with pleasure or forbearance; and abruptly, the President declares: “I must return to my duties.” Rolling, F.D.R.-like, to his private quarters, he comes upon the First Lady (in pearls, garter belt, and not much else) in a decidedly un-Eleanor-ish posture, kneeling before the White House butler, her head bobbing like an oil well on the Texas plains.

One year later, Phil Harvey blinks his kindling eyes when asked about the scenes that marked his unlikely (and fully clothed) X-rated movie debut as the president in Tailgunners, produced by Adam & Eve Productions, the porn studio subsidiary of his company, Phil Harvey Enterprises Inc. (PHE).

Puckishly, the 68-year-old answers that he “did a lot of acting” as an undergraduate, and then in New Delhi, where he ran food-distribution programs for the charity CARE, before he founded two NGOs that provide contraceptives and family-planning services in the third world and before he launched a mail-order condom company that’s grown into an $85-million sex-toy and pornographic-movie retailer. As if it were only a hop, skip, and a jump from the Harvard Dramatic Club to Tailgunners, he adds: “Being on the set and getting made up again and into costume with a few naked ladies prancing around was a lot of fun.” But were there naked ladies backstage in Cambridge and New Delhi? “Well, no, of course not,” he huffs, though his neutral expression has a poker-faced affability. He grows testy at any suggestion that his character might encompass substantial conflicts.

Each month, he spends about one week at the helm of Adam & Eve in Hillsborough, N.C. (where PHE was named “Business of the Year” by the local chamber of commerce in 2005) and the rest of his time directing the nonprofit he founded, DKT International (named for D.K. Tyagi, a leading figure in the family-planning movement in India) in Washington, D.C. which, since 1990, has sold contraceptives for bargain prices in the developing world.

Although there is no formal connection between the two organizations, Harvey donates fully half his annual income—more than two million dollars most years—from Adam & Eve. Harvey’s unusual career is comprised of juxtapositions, by turns unnerving and inspiring, that form a story almost as exotic as the biography of any character in a Coney Island sideshow. “I know I’m weird,” Harvey says in his New England– inflected heartland twang. (His father, who manufactured chicken incubators in Illinois, moved the family to Connecticut when Harvey was 12.) “I’ve always been weird. I like that I’m weird.”

His weirdness, unlike Tom Thumb’s or the Bearded Girl’s, is of universal relevance. Phil Harvey’s career dramatizes a timeless mystery that dogs the contemporary quest for “healthy” sexuality. In the United States, sex and virtue are considered strange bedfellows. In Phil Harvey’s world, they’re inextricable. Their offspring is a kind of freedom, with ethical implications one wouldn’t quite expect.

If you were a screenwriter pitching the Phil Harvey story, you’d tell the studio head it’s The People vs. Larry Flynt meets Robin Hood. Working in India in the 1960s, Harvey grew disillusioned with foreign-aid programs whose handouts, he believed, could not keep up with massive population growth. Convinced that family planning offered more effective answers to the problems of poverty and famine in India, he returned to the United States and, on a Ford Foundation grant, studied public health at the University of North Carolina. With an English doctor named Tim Black (the former head of Marie Stopes International, a nonprofit sexual and reproductive health-service provider), Harvey devised a thesis project on the concept of “social marketing”—using commercial means to encourage people to do things that are good for them. Dr. Black and Harvey launched a small but wildly successful mail-order condom company called Population Planning Associates. (One of its first advertisements, in December 1970, bore the slogan, “What are you going to get her for Christmas—pregnant?”) They eventually began sweeping the profits from that venture into a nonprofit they also co-founded, Population Services International (PSI), which encourages reproductive health in the developing world.

In time, the condom business was christened Adam & Eve—oddly, for a man with a mind-bogglingly detailed memory, Harvey says he doesn’t know how he decided on that name—and its offerings “evolved pretty much along the lines of ‘give ’em what they want.’” Having unsuccessfully experimented with adding bric-a-brac such as belt buckles and model airplanes to the catalogue, the company hit pay dirt when they listed a few pieces of lingerie. Following that cue, Adam & Eve sold books and magazines—in a 1979 catalogue, practically all of these items, including the first edition of The Joy of Sex, purport to have educational value—then vibrators and other sex toys, and, finally, videos and DVDs. Condoms still appear in Adam & Eve catalogues, but now account for a tiny 1% of total revenue.

When Adam & Eve started selling porn, Harvey says the company chose products consistent with its original purpose of encouraging reproductive health, such as the Sinclair Institute’s Better Sex instructional videos. The films feature copulating couples coached by sex therapists whose presence “gives permission to a different group of people, especially women, to watch the explicit sexual depictions that follow, and thus brings healthy sexual depictions to a new audience that would not otherwise look at porn,” Harvey explains, with quiet, almost missionary zeal.

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