HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. — The Washington Post published last Friday a belated full obituary for Adam & Eve founder and sexual expression icon Phil Harvey, who passed away at 83 on Dec. 2, 2021.
The headline of the Louie Estrada-penned article honoring Harvey’s life described the retail entrepreneur as a man “who battled government over his sex-product business.”
The Post highlighted how Harvey “used his fortune to support sexual- and reproductive-health programs overseas as a philanthropist.”
“Eloquent, Harvard-educated and favoring Hush Puppies shoes, Mr. Harvey did not fit the stereotypical image of a sex merchant,” Estrada wrote. “He positioned himself as a defender of civil liberties after government prosecutors tried to jail him and close his adult novelty business in the 1980s.”
The obituary also chronicled Harvey’s business career from its beginnings in the early 1970s, when he was a graduate student in public health at the University of North Carolina and started a mail-order condom business as part of his thesis work on family planning administration.
“The business, which began as an experiment to test novel ways of distributing contraceptives, was later named Adam & Eve,” the Post explained. “Under Mr. Harvey and his Chapel Hill classmate Timothy Black, it became a multimillion-dollar company specializing in sexually oriented merchandise. Headquartered in Hillsborough, N.C., Adam & Eve’s parent company, PHE Inc., generates more than $200 million in annual revenue and employs more than 350 workers.”
The Post noted that "about 12 million customers receive its catalogue of products, which includes lingerie, massage oils, erotic books and magazines, X-rated movies and sex toys.”
The obituary also chronicled how Harvey became a main target of the Justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit in the 1980s, and quoted the late businessman’s 2001 book, “The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam & Eve,” in which he wrote that “America prides itself on being a free society, and we do not want our government to so patronize us that we cannot engage in activities that are risky. We do not wish to be protected from ourselves by laws threatening fines or imprisonment for actions that do not affect other people.”
To read the Phil Harvey obituary, visit the Washington Post.
For XBIZ's December obituary, click here.
