John Curtis Estes (August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988) better known as John Holmes, John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd (after the lead character in a series of related films), was one of the most famous male porn stars of all-time, appearing in about 2,500 adult loops, stag films, and porno feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s, including at least one gay feature film and a handful of gay loops. He was best known for his enormous penis, which was heavily promoted as the largest penis in the history of the porn industry and one of the largest penises in the world; the exact figure is uncertain but is generally considered to be around 11 inches long (or 28 cm). He also attracted notoriety for his involvement in the brutal Wonderland Murders in 1981, and his death from AIDS.

He was the subject of a long article in Rolling Stone magazine in 1989 and a feature length documentary, and the inspiration for two Hollywood movies (Boogie Nights and Wonderland).

Born in Pickaway County, Ohio, as John Curtis Estes, Holmes knew very little of his father Ed Estes, a railroad worker, whom walked out on the famly when John was three or four years old. John's mother Mary, a devout Southern Baptist, married Harold Holmes a few years later and changed the family's surname to Holmes. His new stepfather proved to be a violent alcoholic who frequently beat Holmes, the youngest of five children.

At 16, with the permission of his mother, Holmes enlisted in the United States Army and spent three years in Germany in the Signal Corps. Upon his discharge, Holmes moved to Los Angeles where he worked in a variety of jobs, including occasionally as a homosexual prostitute. It was during his stint as an ambulance driver that he met a nurse named Sharon Gebenini. They married in the spring of 1965.

For the next two years, Holmes and his wife lived quiet, uneventful lives. Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a warehouse, but the rigors of driving in and out of a frozen warehouse caused severe health problems, leading to a pneumothorax (lung collapse) on three separate occasions. While recovering from his illness, Holmes frequented a club in Gardena, where a man in the bathroom noticed his extraordinary penis size and encouraged him to do pornography. Initially during the late 1960's, Holmes did magazine work and an occasional 8 mm loop, keeping his work in porn a secret from his wife, which was easier to do in those days as pornography production and distribution were semi-clandestine, and there was no mass productions of video cassettes or DVD's, and no Internet.

So, while the ad copy for his first few dozen loops rarely named him, those that did usually gave him a name that was nowhere near what his real first name was. In fact, one early "Swedish Erotica" brochure from 1973 has five Holmes loops listed, each of which has a different name referring to Holmes even though it is obvious from his facial features that "Fred", "Dave", "Rudy", "Big Dick", and "Stan" are all the same person.

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

In 1973, Holmes' career began to rise 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 an attractive personality could compensate for a lack of other aesthetic characteristics, and a certain amount of acting ability was still demanded of porn stars on a level that is not seen or necessary in today's porn films.

While his vocal inflection was arguably somewhat higher in pitch than one would expect for a "hard boiled private dick", most film critics and fans agreed that Holmes did demonstrate enough acting ability to keep the character of "Johnny Wadd" from being merely a banal, one-dimensional parody of Raymond Chandler's creation, the tough and uncompromising private detective Philip Marlowe. By this time, his addiction to cocaine was becoming a problem, so much so that it was beginning to affect his ability to gain an erection.

Despite his lack of acting ability, what made Holmes famous was his exceptionally large penis. Holmes' first wife, Sharon Gebenini, recalled him claiming to be 10 inches (25 cm) when he first measured himself. However, at the start of his cinematic career, he was widely publicized as having a penis ranging from 12.5 to 16 inches (32–41 cm) long when fully erect.

Different attempts to objectively ascertain the actual length of his penis have led to varying results. An American study of video footage of Holmes' penis concluded his penis was 10–11 inches long (25–28cm), whereas another study comparing many pictures of his penis to the estimated measurements of other parts of his own body led to the conclusion of 8 3/4 inches (22cm). Holmes' longtime manager, Bill Amerson, stated in the documentary Wadd, the Life and Times of John C. Holmes that "I saw John measure himself several times, it was 12 and 5/8 inches".

Veteran porn actress Dorothiea "Seka" Patton has claimed Holmes' penis was the biggest in the industry, though not all who slept with him agree. In the ersatz biography of Holmes' life, Exhausted, Patton compared Holmes to a telephone pole and said that she only wished that she could enjoy more of it. It is probable the actual length of Holmes' penis will never be known accurately.

Regardless of what the actual length of Holmes' penis was, some people question whether he ever achieved full erections on movie sets. Veteran porn actress Annette Haven, for instance, recalled in the documentary Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes that "as the joke goes, if John ever became fully erect, he'd lose consciousness from lack of blood to the brain because his dick was that big. And it's true that his cock was never hard. It [having onscreen sex] was like doing it with a big, soft kind of luffa."

Penis length was not the only questionable statistic used in connection with Holmes. In 1981, he began to spread the rumour that he had had sex with 14,000 women. However, more realistic estimates, such as that of Luke Ford, put the figure at around 3,000. If you assume Holmes' first experience with a woman occurred at 16 as he claimed, then he would have had to have made love to 700 different women a year—1.9 women a day—for the 20 years that had passed. Quick estimates based on the number of loops where Holmes did in fact perform a sexual act with at least one woman, allowing for sexual encounters not performed before a camera, and further mitigated by counting a performing partner only once—again, some actresses, such as Seka, the porn star with whom he was rumored to have had a lurid affair, Connie "Little French Maid" Peterson, Eileen Welles, Victoria Waters, Linda McDowell, Juliet "Aunt Peg" Anderson, and Desiree Cousteau, made numerous loops with Holmes in the 1970s—Ford's estimate of 3,000 by 1981 is closer to being realistic.

Holmes's drug addiction began to seriously affect his ability to perform in porn, and producers' willingness to hire him, so he ventured into crime, selling drugs for gangs, prostituting himself to both men and women, committing credit card fraud and petty theft. In 1976, he met a 16-year old girl, Dawn, who became his girlfriend, and after he fell on hard times he later prostituted both her and himself. In 1981, he was arrested for stealing a computer from a car.

Holmes had developed a close friendship with drug dealer and nightclub owner Eddie Nash, who supplied Holmes with drugs he desired, principally cocaine. At the same time, Holmes was closely associated with the "Wonderland Gang", so-called for the location of their hideout; a rowhouse located on Wonderland Avenue in the wooded Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. Holmes worked for the gang, frequently selling drugs for them. After stealing money during a couple of drug runs, Holmes found himself in trouble with the Wonderland Gang. Allegedly in exchange for his life, he told gang leaders in June 1981 about Nash and a very large stash of drugs, money and jewelry Nash had in his house, and helped to set up a robbery which was committed on the morning of June 29, 1981.

Although Holmes did not participate in the robbery, Nash apparently suspected that Holmes had a part in masterminding it. After getting Holmes to confess to his participation, Nash allegedly exacted revenge against the Wonderland Gang. Two days after the robbery, in the early hours of July 1, 1981, four of the gang's members were found murdered in their rowhouse hideout in what is now known as the Wonderland Murders. Holmes was present during the murders, but it is unclear whether he participated in the killings.

It is also widely believed that a young teenaged girl known as Annie, another of Holmes underage lovers who was pregnant at this time, was present at the Wonderland murders, but hidden in a closet, protected by Holmes. A friend of the Wonderland residents, she was believed to have been assaulted at Nash's residence by several male guests a few days before the robbery, thus giving Holmes and the Wonderland gang reason for the personal humiliation of Nash and his bodyguard during the robbery. It has been alleged that the girl was already in the home before the murders, having been a visitor, and Holmes used her to open the door from the inside and unknowingly give easy access to the interior for the killers, the intent being to not to alert the sleeping occupants of the home. The Wonderland gang were known to be armed and may have been on alert, anticipating some sort of revenge for the robbery. It has been alleged that Nash agreed to let Holmes remove the girl from harms way in exchange for Holmes getting her to open the door and his later cooperation in the form of silence about the events of that night. Nash reportedly gave Holmes several hundred dollars after the murders, part of which was used to send the girl back east, the rest to get Holmes out of town as well. Police have never confirmed nor refuted this element of the story, perhaps to preserve the ongoing investigation or the safety of the girl. The extent of involment of this young girl has come under more serious scrutiny in recent years. According to newspaper articles and websites, this same young girl was arrested 11 years after the Wonderland murders, accused of killing another young woman over a drug deal gone wrong. Newspapers at the time described the killing as "execution style". If convicted, she faced the death penalty. She was acquitted, just as Holmes had been acquitted in the Wonderland killings.

Holmes had been incarcerated in connection with the murders, but released due to lack of evidence. He spent six months on the run with another girlfriend Dawn, but was arrested in Florida and returned to Los Angeles where he was tried and was acquitted of all four murder charges in June 1982. Holmes once again refused to tell authorities what he knew about the case, and spent some time in jail for contempt of court. When Holmes was released from jail, he attempted to reunite with his estranged wife, but she was not interested. According to Sharon Holmes, "He said that he would change and get out of the business. I told him that he didn't know how to change. I remember this because it is the first time I said the word f*** and I told him Get the f*** out of my life."

Holmes then sought to reunite with Dawn, who, unknown to Holmes, had gone to Thailand with her father, where she stayed for nearly seven years. She did not return to Los Angeles until several weeks before Holmes's death in 1988. It is unknown if he had any further contact with Annie, though it is verified he made several trips to the east coast after his release from prison and before his death.

Gebenini divorced Holmes in 1985, but only after an IRS tax lien on Holmes (and by proxy his wife) nearly wiped out her finances. When Holmes resumed work in porn in November 1982, the industry had begun the transition from film to video. Work was still plentiful, but less lucrative and he was no longer the premier male star. His drug addiction continued, as did the inconsistency of his ability to perform on set. At this time, he appeared to have become disillusioned with the porn industry. His inability to gain an erection was becoming common, and employers began opting for younger talent.

As Holmes' career started to decline, possibly in an act of financial desperation, he starred in his only full-length feature gay porn movie, The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes in 1983. In the movie, Holmes performs unprotected anal sex on Joey Yale who died of AIDS in 1986. His heterosexual fan base was unaware that Holmes had experimented with bisexuality for years as part of early loops and his self-prostitution outside of the porn industry.

Around this time he met his future girlfriend and wife, Laurie Rose, a.k.a. Misty Dawn, a fellow porn actress. In the early 198Laurie Rose, Holmes claimed that he never used needles and was deeply afraid of them. However, many porn historians and industry insiders from that era have heard testimony from some of Holmes' fellow performers to the contrary. Some have first-hand knowledge of his heroin abuse and also cite on-screen evidence of visible vein damage to the insides on Holmes' forearms. This damage becomes more apparent as Holmes moved from 8 mm loops to feature films, where the better quality of the 35mm film stock showed the detail that grainy 8 mm tended to mask.

Regardless of the nature of his addiction, other risk factors were present in his lifestyle, and there is no way to identify which of them led to his HIV infection. There has been speculation that experimentation with homosexuality—including the frequently mentioned rumor that he used the services of transsexual prostitutes—was the source of his infection. Other reports claim that, while in jail during the Wonderland Murders investigation, Holmes had at least one male-male sexual encounter with another prisoner who was HIV positive; the more gaudy version has jail guards bribing Holmes with better treatment, including beer and other contraband, if he would sodomize other prisoners who either had violated prison rules or were known to be homosexuals and were the victims of sadistic games on the part of the guards. To date, however, no clear evidence of any of these assertions has ever been offered.

Holmes's first wife Sharon Gebenini and longtime porn friend Bill Amerson both dispute the rumours of intravenous drug abuse. Says Gebenini: "When I heard that he had contracted AIDS I knew that it had to have been transmitted sexually rather than from drug abuse. This man was terrified of needles, absolutely terrified. So I knew it was sexually transmitted. There is no other way". Amerson similarly states, "To those who claim to have shot drugs with John I say bullshit. John was terrified of needles." These accounts are all the more significant when one considers that while Gebenini and Amerson were both very close to Holmes, they barely knew each other as Gebenini wanted nothing to do with Holmes's porn friends and did not associate with them at all.

Holmes continued to have unprotected sex in the adult film industry without informing any of his partners of his status, and worked until the disease emaciated him in 1987. One notable female performer he worked with, "Lisa DeLeeuw", did indeed die of AIDS in 1993. The last time she performed with Holmes, however, apparently was in 1981, which makes it unlikely that she contracted HIV from Holmes.

Holmes married Laurie Rose in January 1987. Two weeks before his death, two police detectives visited him in the hospital, in another futile attempt to extract information about the Wonderland murders. John Holmes died froDS on March 13, 1988 at the age of 43. His body was immediately cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea. Laurie Rose took the name Laurie Holmes and later published the book Porn King: Autobiography of John C. Holmes in 1998

Holmes's legacy has become more renowned and publicly acceptable. A documentary on his wild life (Wadd—The Life and Times of John C. Holmes) has achieved cult status among certain late-night college campus independent film houses, and some elements of the film Boogie Nights were loosely based on Holmes's life, including the Laurel Canyon "Wonderland" murders. That aspect of Holmes' life was presented in a biographical movie called Wonderland, starring Val Kilmer and released on October 17, 2003.

Finally, since the majority of Holmes' loops have gone into public domain following the collapse of Caballero Control Corporation in 1990, there are efforts underway to locate all surviving 8 mm loops starring Holmes and convert them to DVD for posterity. However, since the life expectancy of most 8 mm films is very poor due to the nature of the film stock used at that time it is believed that as much as 60–70% of Holmes' loops may already be lost forever.

• Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story (1981 documentary)
• Wadd - The Life and Times of John C. Holmes (1998 documentary)
• The Devil and John Holmes by Mike Sager, Rolling Stone, June 15, 1989; reprinted in "Scary Monsters and Super Freaks" (2004). • Porn King: Autobiography of John C. Holmes (1998).
• XXXL: The John Holmes Story (2000 documentary)