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Good Sex

by Michael Joseph Gross
Spring 2007

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.

phil harvey

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.

Good Sex

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.”