Philip D. Harvey is the quiet legend of the adult entertainment industry that everyone should know. Besides being the founder of Adam & Eve, America's largest adult mail-order company, Harvey has fought for free sexual expression rights for more than a quarter of a century, having been involved, in the mid-?70s, in a Supreme Court case seeking to legalize the selling of condoms by mail order.
But Carey v. Population Services International was just the start of Harvey's legal battles with the government. Not long after he'd formed PHE, Inc., Adam & Eve's parent company, and begun selling sex toys, lube and condoms to the general public, the company's offices were raided by a team of FBI agents — an action that led to Adam & Eve being charged, at the state and later the federal levels, with disseminating obscenity; namely, the mail-order catalogs that the company had mailed to millions of interested consumers. Harvey fought those charges at every turn, as chronicled in his book, The Government vs. Erotica, and won every single case, in the process also winning a federal appeals court decision barring the U.S. Department of Justice from bringing indictments against a defendant for the same offense in multiple separate jurisdictions — a tactic that the government had used successfully to drive other adult mail order companies out of business through bankruptcy (or fear of it) due to astronomical legal expenses to fight the multiple indictments.
But today, Harvey has greater concerns than obscenity indictments.
"I think First Amendment rights are in somewhat better shape today," Harvey told AVN in an exclusive interview. "The trends on censorship, particularly of material that has no 'war on terror' significance, have generally been pretty good. I mean, we're not going back to the days when Ulysses will be banned, or Lady Chatterley's Lover. But I think the state of liberty in America is certainly threatened by the war on terrorism and by the PATRIOT Act specifically. The FBI under some circumstances [can] bypass a good many of the checks and balances of the Fourth Amendment. That's extremely worrisome, as is the fact that the war on terror is in all probability never going to end; it enables them to expand their power; it enables them to do things that they can't do without the threat of violence and war, as does, for example, the war on drugs, which is another source of undermining civil liberties on a grand scale in this country."
On the other hand, Harvey suspects that some of the conservative candidates that Bush is expected to propose to fill Supreme Court vacancies may surprise him once in office.
"Once a judge has a lifetime appointment, it's very hard to predict how they're going to develop," he said. "I deal with the reproductive rights people a lot, and they're all in a frenzy that Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned. I don't think there's a remote chance of that, but the fact that the Court may become somewhat more conservative is a possibility in the next four years."
"Clinton appointed a lot of judges; they didn't all turn out the way he expected them to be either," Harvey continued. "Bush will tilt the federal judiciary toward the right, no question about it, but it isn't going to be any kind of landslide. It'll be a slow process and one that I don't think will result in any dramatic threats to free speech. Also, a lot of conservative judges respect the First Amendment."
Harvey still spends much of his time at his other company, DKT International, which markets contraceptives in developing countries and "has now become a pretty large player in the international family planning and AIDS prevention game."
"It's a bleak picture, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and most particularly in southern Africa," Harvey said, referring to the spread of HIV. "This is the only time I think in the past century where we're actually seeing life expectancy at birth go down from 65 to 60 to 55, and the number of orphans as a percent of the population is just mind-boggling. I don't, frankly, understand why people have not done more just to change their behavior. The polling indicates quite clearly that people understand how you get it, they understand that it's fatal, and yet it goes on."
Speaking of Adam & Eve, Harvey is happy with the company's progress on all fronts, from their new VOD/streaming video/chat site, adamevegold.com, to their high-definition video productions — video and DVD sales currently account for 25 percent of the company's bottom line — to their home party division.
"It's called Temptations Parties," Harvey noted. "It's headed by Marlene Janssen, a former Playboy Playmate and a very enthusiastic proponent of the home party system. Geographically, our coverage is still small; we're still learning our own way, but I think there's some real potential there."
Harvey is also pleased with the company's success in franchising the Adam & Eve name to independent retailer outlets. Adam & Eve has five branded stores in North Carolina, and despite public outcry, recently opened its first franchise outlet in Nassau County, Fla. (See this issue's Legal News.)
Overall, however, "I'm astonished at the power, the diversity, the complexity and the multifariousness of the ways in which people approach sex," Harvey noted from his booth overlooking the exhibit floor. "An Expo like this is a very good opportunity to sort of sense that. It's exciting, and it's exciting to be part of this industry. I'm delighted to be part of it. I've always enjoyed controversy, and this is controversy about something that's fun, good for you and highly pleasurable. I don't know how you could do any better."
