John Curtis Holmes, better known as John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd, was one of the most prolific male porn stars of all time, appearing in about 2,500 adult loops, stag films, and pornographic feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s. He was best known for his giant penis, which was heavily promoted as being the longest, thickest, and hardest in porn.

Holmes was the subject of several books, a lengthy essay in Rolling Stone magazine, and at least two feature length documentaries, and was the inspiration for two Hollywood movies, Boogie Nights and Wonderland.

“John Holmes was to the adult film industry what Elvis was to rock ‘n’ roll. He simply was The King.” -Cinematographer Bob Vosse in the documentary Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes.

John Holmes frequented a men’s card-playing club in Gardena, California, where one evening a still photographer, standing next to him at a urinal, noticed his huge penis and encouraged him to do porn. During the late 1960s, Holmes initially did magazine work and an occasional 8 mm loop, keeping his work in porn a secret from his wife.

With the success of Deep Throat (1972), The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), and Behind the Green Door (1972), porn became chic, although its legality was still hotly contested. John Holmes was arrested during this time for pimping and pandering, but he avoided prison time by becoming an informant for the LAPD.

In 1971, Holmes‘ career began to take off with a porn series built around a private investigator named Johnny Wadd. By 1978, Holmes was reputed to be earning as much as $3,000 a day as a porn actor. He starred at a time when personality could compensate for a lack of other aesthetic characteristics, and a certain amount of acting ability was still demanded of porn stars.

John Holmes‘ main asset in the porn business was his exceptionally large penis. No definitive measurement or documentation verifying this exists, leaving its exact size unknown.

Veteran porn actress Dorothea “Seka” Patton has stated that Holmes‘ penis was the biggest in the industry. John Holmes‘ first wife recalled him claiming to be 10 inches when he first measured himself. Holmes himself once claimed his penis to be fifteen inches long. John Holmes‘ longtime manager, Bill Amerson, said that “I saw John measure himself several times, it was 13 and a half inches.” Reviewing Holmes‘ films over the course of his career shows that most of his early co-stars tended to be short and slender, whereas women with whom he engaged in onscreen sex later in his career were much taller and had proportionately larger bodies. This caused John Holmes‘ penis size to seem different compared to each of his co-stars.

So celebrated was Holmes‘ penis size it was used as a marketing tool for films he wasn’t even in. Anybody but My Husband had the promotional tag line “Tony The Hook Perez has a dick so big that he gives even John Holmes a run for his money.” After his death the length of Holmes‘ penis continued to be used to market Holmes-related material. At the premier of the film Wonderland, patrons were given thirteen-and-a-half inch rulers as gag gifts.

In 1981, John Holmes began to claim that he had sex with 14,000 women. To substantiate this number, and assuming Holmes‘ first experience with a woman occurred at 16 as he claimed, then he would have had to have sex with 666 different women a year-1.8 women a day-for the next 21 years. Pornography historian Luke Ford calculated the number of John Holmes‘ sexual partners over the course of his lifetime to be roughly 3,000.

Read More About John Holmes and see his complete Filmography HERE