For fear of sounding like a Republican baby boomer, Gen X and Y-ers can learn a thing or two from Phil Harvey. Having built the Adam & Eve empire from a simple mail-order condom business, Harvey takes the profits and pours them into nonprofit organizations overseas. If you can’t believe his humanitarian streak, or feel it’s impossible one person can care so much about others, then blame it on wanderlust. But whatever it is, he’s moving while the current generation is making love to their desktops.

Modesty isn’t usually associated with great people—the top 10 wealthy people listed in Forbes come to mind. While the people in the aforementioned magazine attribute their greatness to their willingness to work for money, Harvey defines greatness in the “instinct” to help people, which he believes all humans have. That may be true, but 99 percent of the world’s population has never received a humanitarian award.

SexHerald: You are currently the president and founder of PHE, Inc., which is the parent company of Adam & Eve. What exactly is PHE and what does it stand for?

Phil Harvey: PHE is an adult products company [and] is primarily a retailer but we sell by catalog through the mail, we sell on the Internet—which is becoming increasingly important—we franchise retail stores, which we now have about a dozen. We also produce some adult videos under our own name: Adam & Eve Productions. We also have a branch that sells adult products for both parties. PHE originally stood—but we don’t use the name anymore other than the initials—but, it came from my name Phil Harvey Enterprises. That’s not the way we like to be known.

SH: So, Adam & Eve was created by PHE?

Harvey: Well, actually the trade name ‘Adam & Eve’ existed from the very beginning. They were essentially created at the same time. That is, when we founded PHE we also registered Adam & Eve as a trade name.

SH: I understand that Adam & Eve is truly unique in that it’s the only adult company that was created to fund philanthropic efforts.

Harvey: It wasn’t specifically created to fund philanthropic enterprises but that has in fact occurred through my own participation and my own ownership. We had—Tim Black and I, who co-founded the company and the original nonprofit organization working overseas—in the back of our minds if we started a company that turned out to be profitable, which, of course we hoped it would, that we could use some of that income to support the overseas programs, and that’s what I have found.

SH: When you say “overseas programs,” you mean family planning, keeping the HIV/AIDS infection down in poorer countries, and educating people about birth control and safe sex where such types of learning are not readily available. These issues seem dear to you. Why do you feel so strongly about them to the extent you built your entire life’s work dedicated to helping people when most will probably not care to do what you have done?

Harvey: There are a lot of people who do care about these issues, and I have for, as you suggest, all of my career been concerned about family planning and birth control in developing countries since HIV/AIDS became an issue, which was after I have been working in family planning for a decade or more. We added that because it was clear condoms were extremely important in the battle against HIV/AIDS, and we were already in the business of selling and marketing condoms as part of our family planning effort. So, it made a great deal of sense to add the HIV/AIDS prevention focus to our condom marketing.

But, I have been concerned about that; I was originally convinced of the urgent importance of family planning when I spent five years in India with CARE in the early 1960s. At that time, the United States was sending huge amounts of food to India and it was very clear to me that was a mistake in policy, and that if we wanted to be useful we should stop sending food. India, clearly, was capable of growing its own food, which they now, of course, do. But the need for birth control, for family planning, was very clear, and there still is a major need in India. And indeed, we have two programs in India trying to help with that.

SH: You’re a healthy, white, American man who belongs to the upper-middle class. Why help others? Do you feel a certain social obligation or responsibility to help those who are less fortunate?

Harvey: I’m a child of the 60s. There were a lot of us then, and I think there still are. Specifically, a lot of us who responded to President Kennedy’s call for young Americans to go out into the world and be useful and help people who have less money and less privileges than we ourselves had. And, I took that very seriously—still do. I don’t find anything strange about the philanthropic impulse; I think it’s a normal part of human character to care about other people, practically all of us care about the people close to us. A great many of us care about those in our own society who are less fortunate, and Americans generally do a great deal of volunteer and other work on behalf of fellow Americans, and it’s simply an extension of that instinct that there were even more deserving and more desperately needy people in the very poor countries of the world than there are in the United States. So, that’s where I’ve always focused.

SH: You received the Humanitarian Award last summer by the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) for your contribution and promotion of sexual liberties and human rights. How did it feel to receive such an honor?

Harvey: Great!

SH: Backtracking in your life, you did your undergraduate work at Harvard University and graduated with a degree in literature and Slavic languages. When you came out of college, what were you planning to do with that degree?

Harvey: I wasn’t really planning to do anything with that degree; I kind of fell into that major by accident. When I graduated from college, my plans were to go to acting school. I have been accepted—this was shortly after graduation—into the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. LAMDA, it was called, and a very, very prestigious school for the theater and that’s what I wanted to do. I felt very lucky to have been accepted there. Then I went in and talked to my draft board—this was back in 1961—and, we had a draft and it was very much in the minds of young men my age. I mentioned that I was interested in attending LAMDA and they said, ‘We’ll give you your deferment while you’re actually in school but you’ll be draftable as soon as you get out.’ Then I said, ‘What about the Peace Corps?’ Because I was also very interested at that time in the Peace Corps, which had just turned into being and it was part of Kennedy’s call to action around the world. And they said, ‘Same thing. We’ll defer you while you’re serving in the Peace Corps for two years. As soon as you’re finished with that service, we’re going to draft you, or we’re very likely to draft you.’

I just decided, at that point, with the draft thing hanging over my head for the next 4-5 years, which was just something I didn’t want to do. So I volunteered for the draft, as it was called. I said, ‘I’m ready now. Take me now; don’t keep the suspense going any longer.’ I went into the army for two years. By the time I had finished that service, which was mostly in Fort Meade, Maryland—it was easy duty because the Korean War was over and the Vietnam War had not really begun to heat up yet—so, I fell comfortably between two conflicts.

When I finished that tour of duty, I had determined that what I most wanted to do was to go live and work in a completely different culture in another country. In other words, the Peace Corps instinct won out over the stage-and-acting instinct. At that point, I pretty much gave up the idea of a professional career in the theater and found a job with CARE in India.

SH: Do you ever regret not attending LAMDA?

Harvey: Sometimes. But, there’s too many things to do to spend much time worrying about those turning points in one’s life but that was certainly one.

SH: Then I understand you attended University of North Carolina for their School of Public Health. When did you attend and did you ever graduate and with what degree?

Harvey: I attended in 1969-70, which was after the five years with CARE. I got a degree in family planning administration, it was called, from the Department of Health Administration and Master’s degree. Specifically because of the interest I had developed in family planning while I was in India and the Ford Foundation was offering very generous scholarships to people in what they call mid-career fellowships to get them interested in population and family planning issues, and the University of North Carolina was in one in about 6-7 American universities that had advanced degree programs in that subject area, and I picked North Carolina which was one of the best at that time.

SH: You mentioned your interest in family planning developed during your stay in India. What were the particulars of your stay that got you interested?

Harvey: It was very graphic, because most of the job CARE was doing, that I and my colleagues were doing there was feeding schoolchildren and preschool children. Every year, we would add another million kids—it was a very, very big program—we would add another million kids to the school lunch program and every year we would sit down and say, ‘We’re farther behind than we were before,’ because the number of schoolchildren had grown by more than a million in that short period of time. And that was the first thing that kind of brought it home to me: That sending food and feeding kids was not the way to be helpful than giving people an opportunity to plan and space their children and presumably reduce the rate of population growth would be a much more useful thing to do.

SH: Going back just a little bit… while you were attending University of North Carolina, that’s where you met Tim Black, who you mentioned earlier co-founded Adam & Eve with you. I believe that’s where you two started the business by selling condoms by mail. My question is: You knew it was illegal to sell adult products by mail yet what inspired you to continue anyway?

Harvey: Tim and I were particularly interested in finding non-clinical, non-medical ways of disseminating family planning. Tim had done some very careful research on the number of doctors and health facilities available in developing countries. While family planning was beginning to be supported in Europe and the United States through clinics—in the United States primarily through Planned Parenthood—Tim documented very starkly that trying to deliver family planning to large numbers of people in places, like India and Nepal and sub-Saharan Africa, could simply not work because there weren’t enough doctors and there weren’t enough trained health personnel to cope with sick people let alone bring fertility control services to people who are well.

We began on the understanding that we would have to find non-medical, non-clinical ways of bringing family planning to people. The first idea that popped into our heads in the United States was to sell condoms through the mail, because that was a popular way of selling condoms in Europe and nobody was doing it here because of the law you mentioned. So we said, ‘We’ll give that a try,’ and I actually got permission to do some condom mail-order marketing as part of my thesis work at UNC. As a result of the Comstock law that made all contraceptives and all information about birth control obscene and unavailable under the 100-year-old law. Nobody else was doing it, and we did it at some risk, particularly Tim, because he had a wife and two young daughters who were a little nervous at the possibility he might end up in the slammer, which he could have.

We went and did it, anyway. And the orders just came rolling in because here was a market that had been waiting for years and years and years for somebody to serve it and nobody had because it was illegal. Then we saw the profit potential because it was clear there was a demand for mail-order condoms and from that we grew the basic Adam & Eve business.

SH: During 1986-92, you were a key component in fighting the U.S. Department of Justice because they attempted to shut down adult businesses during that time, which was probably a major contribution in the success of adult businesses today. Who’s to say if nobody fought then, there would have been another victory in-between and adult businesses would be thriving today. It’s apparent that it’s important your business stays alive to continue to fund your efforts overseas. Why do you think it’s important that adult businesses exist and/or succeed in general?

Harvey: First of all, I’m a strong proponent of freedom. And if people want to see sexy videos, there’s no reason in the world why they should be prohibited by their government from doing so. It’s anti-freedom; it’s interference with our natural right. Secondly, I think sex is good. I think it is a good and healthy and positive aspect of the human condition and that those who consider it to be inherently evil or bad or dirty are missing some of the most important good things in life and making a very great mistake. If the adult industry is serving the needs and wishes of its customers within the bounds—I hasten to say—of certain strictures. That is, we do not, and the adult industry generally does not, condone ANY form of sexual depictions involving underage performers, for example, or even people pretending to be underage. And there are other very unhealthy sexual depictions, particularly those involving coercion of one party by another, that we will never sell either because the experts tell us this is NOT a healthy form of sexuality and that we should not be disseminating those kinds of depictions. But given the fundamental principle that video and other items that we sell depict human sexuality in a positive and healthy and joyful and lustful way, then it seems to me there is every reason that people are entitled to those kinds of materials and we’re happy to help create and supply them.

SH: So, why is the company called ‘Adam & Eve?’ Any relation to the biblical story, by any chance?

Harvey: This is a question that has come up, as you would expect, a number of times and neither Tim nor I could remember how it happened, how it got started. It goes right back to the beginning; he doesn’t remember suggesting it, I don’t remember suggesting it but somehow we put Adam & Eve on one of the first catalogs and couple of years later we registered the trademark and logo and that’s where we’ve been ever since. I just don’t know. I admit it’s odd.

The original man and original woman—I can see how the idea might have come up. We’re after all talking about sex products and the original sexual relationship between Adam and Eve is the best known of almost any in our culture so that makes a certain amount of sense, but I just don’t remember the circumstances.

SH: And that brings us to the present. You’re 68. Are you currently married?

Harvey: Yes.

SH: Any children?

Harvey: I have two stepchildren. My wife’s two children, a daughter who’s married and lives in Los Angeles and they have three children. So, I have three step-grandchildren now as well. And her son lives in San Francisco, not married.

SH: Is your wife involved with the adult industry in any way?

Harvey: No, she’s an artist and is now working—I should say slightly more than full time—as the curator of exhibits in an art center in Rockville, Maryland.

SH: You’ve essentially created an empire that I’m sure has good karmic implications for you down the road. Is there anything yet for you to do? What do you see yourself doing 10-20 years from now?

Harvey: Well if I’m not dead, which is certainly a possibility—especially in 20 years—yes, there is another thing that I would like to do and working, in fact, rather hard to do, and that is to publish fiction. I’ve written three novels and about 25 short stories, and I have in fact published eight of the short stories in various literary magazines. I’ve been sending my novels out for the last 10 years to absolutely no avail. I have learned, having published three nonfiction books, there is a huge chasm between the nonfiction world and the fiction world, and it is exceedingly difficult to get a first novel published in anywhere I think. But I’m still working on it and I would be absolutely tickled pink if one of my novels ever got accepted for publication. In the meantime, I’m very pleased that some of my stories are.