LOS ANGELES—Mark Kernes, the former legal editor for AVN magazine and long-time board member for the Free Speech Coalition whose remarkable career as an adult industry journalist spanned over 37 years, died Wednesday at 76.
Kernes, who retired in 2021, had been in poor health for much of the past two years due to a variety of medical conditions. He began receiving hospice care earlier this week at his home in Oroville, California—about 70 miles north of Sacramento.
The prolific writer, movie critic and political commentator held various job titles with AVN, including Assistant Editor and Managing Editor. His official title upon retirement was Senior Editor and Chief Legal Analyst—the latter thanks to his 20 years of experience as a court reporter.
AVN founder Paul Fishbein first hired Kernes to write movie reviews on a freelance basis in early 1983, when the two met at Movies Unlimited, a video store in Philadelphia where Fishbein was the manager and Kernes was a regular customer.
“Mark Kernes was clearly much of the heart and soul of AVN for decades,” Fishbein said. “A true believer in both adult movies as an art form and the First Amendment of the Constitution, he played many roles with the company, most notably the legal correspondent for many years.
“He actually worked at AVN longer than I did, since when I sold the company in 2010, it had been 28 years.”
Fishbein continued, “I first met Mark when he came into Movies Unlimited as a customer around 1981, and he was the first freelance reviewer we hired in 1983. He supplemented his income as a court reporter by reviewing adult movies for AVN. Eventually he came on as first a part-time employee, and then full-time as assistant editor under Gene Ross.
“When we moved to Los Angeles in 1991, it was basically Mark, Gene and myself and we left the Philadelphia office open for a few years so that our existing employees (whom were offered the opportunity to move but didn’t want to relocate to Los Angeles) there would have their jobs.”
Fishbein said when Kernes got to L.A., he thrived.
“Especially as the industry experienced more heat from the federal government,” the AVN founder recalled. “Kernes’ coverage on the legal issues facing the adult industry were essential to everyone who did business in adult.
“Pre-internet, Kernes was probably the most important news reporter covering the legal issues facing the adult industry in the country.”
Fishbein added, “I always called Mark a ‘lifer.’ He seemed born to be in the industry. He enjoyed the challenges, but also the people, the products and the lifestyle. His obsession with 3D photography was infectious as many past adult stars whom he photographed knows.
“And most importantly, not a single person I’ve ever met had a bad word to say about Mark. He was quirky, intellectual, and odd in a good way. But Mark also had an easy, friendly manner that was infectious. In the 40-plus years I knew him, I can count on two fingers when he was annoyed with me. He was easy-going, smart and a gentleman in every sense of the word.
“AVN would not have been AVN without Mark Kernes.”
A staunch advocate for free speech and an articulate defender of adult industry interests, Kernes served on the Board of Directors of the Free Speech Coalition for almost 20 years—more than a dozen as the Secretary, keeping the minutes at each meeting. After leaving the Board in late 2018, FSC voted him as its first “Director Emeritus.”
FSC board chairman Jeffrey Douglas told AVN he knew Kernes for decades.
“His dedication to the best interests of the people in the adult industry was remarkable,” Douglas said. “Mark did not judge people by any of the superficial characteristics, gender, skin color, ethnicity or orientation.
“Mark also was the first Director to advocate the integration of all sex work into the scope of the Free Speech Coalition. For many years he was the lone voice, but eventually (and gently) persuaded us of the righteousness of that position.
“Mark will likely be remembered most for the extraordinary legal writing. He closely monitored legal developments, especially the obscenity trials of the '80s and '90s. He had the gift of translating complex legal concepts into understandable stories, because, first and foremost, the law impacts human beings. Mark wanted people to understand how the law affected real people.
“His was a gentle, loving soul. He was a very good friend—reliable, kind and judgment-free. We are all poorer for his loss.”
Over the course of his tenure with AVN, Kernes discussed the adult industry on L.A.'s local Fox TV affiliate and also had articles published in Playboy and Penthouse. His bylines extended beyond adult into the academic sphere.
Wiley Publishing asked Kernes to write two articles on the adult video industry that were included in the company's three-volume International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality. In 2018, two of his articles for AVN were nominated for Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club, of which he was a member. Yet another article was nominated in 2019.
Kernes also had a brief adult movie career. While researching an “On the Set” article in 1996, he was approached by studio head Ed DeRoo, who asked, “So, do you think you'd like to act in one of my movies?” After receiving permission from Fishbein, Kernes agreed, and became the title character in The Secret Life of Herbert Dingle, where he appeared in two sex scenes. (One of his scene partners, the actress stage-named Chanel, sent him Christmas cards for several years afterwards, and another, Sharon Mitchell, not only obtained a doctorate in Public Health, but founded the adult industry's first STD testing service—and remained a friend.)
Fishbein was less than pleased with the notoriety Kernes' movie role engendered, and created the “Dingle Rule”: No AVN staffer is allowed to appear having sex in a hardcore movie. Hence, Kernes failed to tell Fishbein that two years later he appeared anonymously in a POV blowjob movie, Blowjob Fantasies, directed by Jim Powers for Toxxxic Entertainment.
“The first time I met Mark Kernes, I was kind of in awe of him, because I had seen Jenna Jameson thank him in one of her AVN Awards acceptance speeches, and I figured that made him a bit of a celebrity,” said AVN managing editor Peter Warren. “As I got to know him over the years, I came to appreciate him as another aficionado like myself, and the most well-versed writer I've known in legal matters surrounding the adult industry. I'll never forget driving him back to L.A. from our expo one year, when he told me I should take more of an interest in the legal side of things. I took that advice to heart.
“I will also never forget the 'Mark Kernes Lunchroom' in the old AVN office. If you know, you know.”
“Mark was one of a kind,” added AVN editor-in-chief Dan Miller. “He was an encyclopedia of knowledge about the history of porn and his passion for legal reporting was second to none. But Mark never turned down an assignment regardless what the topic was—and he could write about anything. He was outspoken, opinionated and fierce when it came to voicing his beliefs—and his influence came to define AVN’s legal voice.”
Often describing himself as a "red diaper baby," Kernes was born in 1948 to former Communist sympathizers Harry and Freda Kernes—he a court reporter and she a beauty salon owner. Mark grew up in Trenton, N.J.—and one of his earliest memories was his parents taking him and his baby sister to a “Ban The Bomb” protest in Washington, D.C. in 1956.
He said his love of writing was first kindled by his sixth grade teacher, Miss Emily Schmidt, whose class took a trip to New York City to see the Guggenheim Museum. When they returned, she assigned the class to write about the experience. Kernes turned in two pages, which Miss Schmidt promptly handed back and said, “You can do better.” A day later, he handed her 10 pages—and a writer was born.
Kernes got most of his schooling in Trenton, but attended the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Mass., for his final two years of high school, before graduating and attending Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) for about six months ... as a chemistry major.
He almost failed chemistry, physics and calculus at “Tech,” but he scored A's and B's in History and English. He also discovered marijuana the previous summer when he was a counselor at the socialist summer camp, Camp Webatuck, in upstate New York and he took his first LSD trip with some Windsorites during Thanksgiving weekend of 1966.
Soon after, Kernes and a college buddy left Tech for a cross-country journey that eventually led them, via Idaho Falls, Idaho and Tucson, Ariz., to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in the Spring of 1967, during the heyday of the hippie movement.
They would spend four months sleeping in crash pads and missing a lot of meals, but soon Kernes tired of being homeless and broke.
He’d panhandled on the street in front of the hippie "landmark" The Drogstore, with a sign reading, "Can you spare a Tab®"—and convinced his parents to get him a plane ticket home, where he enrolled in Bucks County Community College (BCCC) in the Fall of ’67.
He majored in liberal arts at Bucks before transferring to New York University as an English major in 1969. It was also at this time that Kernes' then-girlfriend became pregnant without ever having had sex—the pregnancy was terminated at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, after being "approved" by a medical board. Following the abortion procedure, the doctors confirmed that her hymen had been intact.
While at BCCC, Kernes discovered Alan Watts' The Way of Zen, and began his search for "enlightenment." It was also at about this time that on one of his trips to New York City, Kernes happened across a newsprint magazine called The Realist, the "magazine of free thought and satire," edited by Paul Krassner, and it quickly became his favorite publication.
It also helped Kernes develop a style of writing that stood him in good stead for more than five decades. (Krassner later wrote for AVN's one-time sister magazine, AVN Online.)
While at BCCC, Kernes was also busted for possession and sale of marijuana, which resulted in a two-year probationary period. While attending NYU, he stopped by the East Side Bookstore in lower Manhattan, where he saw a book that would have a huge effect on his life: The Boo Hoo Bible, by Art Kleps, with a colorful drawing of what he later learned was the "Neo-American Space Fleet" destroying the planet Saturn.
The volume was the "catechism" of a religion "Chief Boo Hoo" Kleps had invented called the Neo-American Church, whose sacraments were marijuana, LSD and other psychedelics, and whose philosophy was "solipsistic nihilism," expressed in the church mottos, "Life Is A Dream" and "I deny the externality of relations.”
Kernes, who also had stints working at McDonald’s and Chicken Delight during college, had taken acid fairly frequently while at BCCC, so joining the church seemed natural.
Eventually, he became the "Primate of Pennsylvania," a mid-level clergy with power over nothing, and his "religious experience" was profiled in The Drummer, an "underground" paper in Philadelphia in the 1970s-'80s. Kernes remained a Church member for nearly 20 years. (He later discovered, to his chagrin, that Kleps and he had very different views on important societal issues such as sexism and racism, and he abandoned the church altogether in the late ‘80s.)
It was also about this time that Kernes watched what would become his favorite movie, O Lucky Man. (A very close second, also from that era, was John Byrum's Inserts, which Kernes called “the best ever porn film that's not a porn film.”)
During his senior year at NYU, and with no job prospects in sight, Kernes' father convinced him to take a course in machine shorthand, and after graduation, helped him get a job with a court reporting agency in Philadelphia, Rubenstein & Kimmel.
He soon moved to West Philadelphia and worked at three local court reporting agencies. In the early '70s, while still living with his parents in the Trenton area, he was contacted by a reporter for The Trenton Times about his interest in comic books, which he had been collecting since he found his first one (Action Comics #235) in 1957 in an alley near his house. The Times article also profiled a group of artists named "Howski." Intrigued, Kernes contacted them in Levittown, Pa., where they were based, and began a friendship with many of its members that continued till his death.
It was Matt Howarth, the head of Howski, who created the character of "Bobby Neuwave," which was based on Kernes. He would adopt that name as a pseudonym for some of his writing, making it his porn alias. Kernes also attended several comic book and science fiction conventions in the '70s and '80s with Howski members and their fans and associates—a couple of whom were strippers, marking Kernes' first contact with such artists.
Howski—and Howarth, in particular—helped Kernes form musical tastes that lasted a lifetime. He introduced him to musicians and bands such as Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Shriekback, Brian Eno, Hawkwind, Can, Klaus Schulze, David Bowie, 10cc, Wall of Voodoo, The Tubes, Duran Duran and perhaps most fondly, Nash the Slash.
In 1982, Kernes discovered the tax protest movement. Robert Graham, a libertarian and the father of an old girlfriend, led the movement on a local level. And it was Graham who convinced Kernes, who'd had libertarian leanings since NYU, that taxation was immoral and illegal, and that on his tax returns—in any space that asked for his income—he should write "Fifth Amendment" in protest of having to sign the return "under penalty of perjury."
The government didn't agree, and in 1983, it prosecuted Kernes and several fellow members and leaders of the tax protest group. Kernes would receive a three-month sentence for "Willful failure to file taxes," a federal misdemeanor, in Allenwood Federal Prison Camp. He later reconsidered his political beliefs and became a staunch progressive.
Upon his release from prison, Kernes continued his court reporting profession, though now in Media, Pa., working at Varallo-Alfe Reporting there for the next eight years. He rented a room from a married couple and their gay friend, all Grateful Dead fans, for part of that time. It was around this time that Kernes and his former housemate, Paul Yannuzzi, began making holograms at a lab at the Franklin Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, sparking a decades-long interest in all things 3D.
He would bring that love for 3D photography to his work in adult in 1995, when he began taking 3D photos on the sets of adult productions. By the time of his death, he had amassed well over 10,000 3D images, many of them hardcore—the only person in the world working continually in that genre. Upon his death, those photos—slides and digital—were to be split between the Los Angeles 3D Club, of which he was a long-time member and where he sometimes displayed his on-set photos—and the Kinsey Institute.
When Fishbein invited Kernes to become employed full-time as one of the magazine's editors and move out west in 1991, Kernes moved from Media to Hollywood and began his adult industry career in earnest.
In the Fall of 1991, with the magazine expanding its reach and readership, Fishbein was faced with something of a dilemma: The magazine had classified adult movies into two basic categories: Video (or Film) Features, which had storylines, and Shot-on-Video Features, which were all sex and no story. However, some producers had released tapes that blurred the lines between those two genres, such as Moonlight Entertainment's Radical Affairs Magazine, which combined sex scenes with video editorials by the company's employees and on-camera interviews with some of the stars.
According to Kernes’ recollection—and something that would become a point of contention internally at AVN for decades—Fishbein called a meeting of the editorial staff that fall to discuss what this new category of video releases should be called.
Kernes, a long-time fan of self-described "gonzo journalist" Hunter S. Thompson, claimed that he suggested that the new genre be named "gonzo," in homage to Thompson's scattershot writing style. The name stuck, and has been a recognized adult genre ever since. (Fishbein has maintained over the years that it actually was Gene Ross who coined the term.)
It wasn't too long after that in 1995—when Fishbein found Kernes dozing off at his desk and threatened to fire him—that Kernes saw a rheumatologist and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Following that he was required to sleep attached to a CPAP breathing-assist machine for the rest of his life.
If Kernes could be said to have a motto by which he lived, it would be the song lyric, “Love lifts us up where we belong.”
Much of Kernes' writing for AVN was compiled in his book Preachers vs. Porn: Exposing Christianity's War on Sexxx, published in 2022 by Palmetto Publishing.
He is survived by his wife, Margaret Knowles; his sister and brother, Susan and Julian, and several cousins.
