October 2021 began on a sad note for the webmaster community, as a family Facebook post confirmed that one of its most beloved figures, Julius “JFK” Kedvessy, had suddenly passed away on September 30.
The news was met with an outpouring of genuine love and appreciation on Facebook from the tightly-knit world euphemistically known as “online adult.” People shared stories about their often cantankerous but always genial friend Julius: the man behind FUBAR Webmasters, the photographer and “record keeper” of their travels and travails, a towering figure — literally — that most saw as essential and irreplaceable.
Two weeks after his passing, an in-person gathering in Oshawa, Ontario, at a regal 1940s theater the irrepressibly enterprising Julius had recently acquired, paid homage to his life, career and friendships, virtually broadcast to the world via the same computer networks that allowed Julius to go from small businessman-of-all trades in Canada to world-traveling webmaster.
By the time of the October 16 “Celebration of Life” at Oshawa’s Biltmore Theatre, Julius’ remains had moved on: he had been cremated, the family reported, “with one last cigar because we have to send him out smoking with style.”
“It was so moving: there were around 200 people at the memorial due to COVID restrictions, and I don’t even know how many through Zoom,” his wife and business partner of almost five decades, Sandra Kane — better known as Sandy — told XBIZ the following day, as she was recovering from organizing the event and still in an understandable daze from losing her lifetime companion.
Sandy described her husband as “one of those people who followed his own path.”
“Or rather, he made his own path and followed it,” she clarified.
Julius, she explained, “had a rather unique perspective of the industry. He made his own job. The mission was to cover everything — and he did cover everything!”
The Man Who Didn’t Know How to Sit Still
“We are married for 46 1/2 years,” Sandy told XBIZ, still using the present tense two weeks after Julius’ passing. “But we’ve been together 49.”
When she first met him, in 1972, Julius was a manager at a booth in a food court in Ontario.
“I was at the Chinese food booth and he managed the pizza booth,” she reminisced with a smile that came through even over the phone.
The tall, hirsute gentleman Sandy met that day was born Julius Kedvessy in Hungary in 1950, but emigrated to Canada when he was 13.
Always-chipper and small-talky Americans were often confused when meeting Julius for the first time. His deadpan, no-bullshit, prove-yourself “crankiness” in tone and words contrasted with the disarming friendliness he readily showed in deeds — a combination that could be chalked up to his European background.
“Being Hungarian was a big part of his personality,” Sandy said.
But the other very evident, and perhaps more crucial, part of his personality was his stamina and drive to “make his own path and follow it.”
Stories abound, including tales about the Julius who, in the 1980s, decided to act in the theater and ended up doing walk-on parts in Canadian TV shows.
“That man didn’t know how to sit still. He always had an idea and went for it,” said a still-impressed and bemused Sandy. “Some worked, some didn’t.”
Being the visual chronicler of the webmaster community was one of many jobs, gigs and enterprises Julius pursued after leaving that initial food court.
“He got into real estate,” Sandy explained. “For a while here he ran an antique store as well. He started doing the traveling shows, the fairs, would go all the way down to Florida. The antique shop turned into a shop where we bought gold.”
But Julius also kept his real estate investments, “and that’s how we ended up owning the building that the Biltmore Theatre is in,” Sandy told XBIZ, referencing the grand location for his memorial.
People Like to Be Seen
Then, in the very late 1990s, Julius decided, out of the blue, to start his own adult sites.
“A friend told him that his nephew was making all kinds of money with adult sites,” Sandy explained. “The fact that it was adult didn’t faze him at all.”
It didn’t faze Sandy either. “‘OK, dear, I’ll help.’ ‘OK, dear, whatever you think,’ I’d say. It wasn’t like he was asking me to model for it! Julius wasn’t one to be shocked by a whole lot of stuff. He wasn’t so hung up on stuff — he could do anything.”
Of course, the couple maintained their privacy in suburban Ontario, surrounded by their kids’ friends and their perhaps not-so-open-minded families.
“It’s part of life, c’mon,” said Sandy. “Don’t get your knickers in a knot about this.”
Soon, behind closed doors, Julius’ adult business started thriving.
With what she calls “a brilliant mind that could figure out whatever he wanted,” Julius and Sandy, as the hands-on webmaster behind the scenes, started building websites with legacy age verification system Adultcheck and making money.
But Julius wanted to learn more about this new business — new to him and to most people at the turn of the millennium — and he began frequenting webmaster boards and attending trade shows.
Which brings us to the origin story, where Julius Kadvessy becomes “JFK, the mighty FUBAR webmaster.”
“He started attending these shows then, to learn about the industry,” Sandy explained. “For his own entertainment, he just started taking pictures, and posting them on the boards. And then we realized that people like to be seen.”
Julius had found a niche that nobody had even imagined: the decidedly non-model-like webmasters loved to have their pictures taken and published almost as much as the nudie cuties featured on their increasingly profitable adult sites.
With his immigrant pluck and Mittel-European obsession for efficiency, Julius now had a mission: “What he needed to do was make sure that everybody at the shows got their picture taken.”
“I first met Julius in 1999 at an early show called IA 2000,” Wasteland’s Colin Rowntree told XBIZ. “There had been shows for several years prior, but then this looming man with a Nikon appeared and started popping photos in seminars and at social events, and he had such a warm smiling way about him that people immediately dropped their guard and allowed for cameos because everyone trusted him to make them look their best.”
“That was the style that he had for the rest of his life,” Rowntree added.
By 2002, Julius and Sandy had tapered down the adult sites and had shifted their focus almost entirely to FUBAR.
With characteristic in-your-faceness, Julius named this meta-photo gallery site FUBAR Webmasters — or FUBAR for short, after the wartime acronym for “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”
“He created the [business] model everybody follows” for industry photo gallery sites, she added.
“We figured out how to monetize the photos by adding the watermark,” Sandy continued. “I’m the webmaster behind the scenes. You talked to me to have a pic taken down. It was me, not Julius, although everyone thought they were talking to him.”
Sandy explained that there were “two reasons, mostly, for people wanting their picture taken down: they didn’t like how they looked — they were having a bad hair day, or something — or they were caught with people they didn’t want others to see them with.”
The business took off. "I am mostly happy with the income, which would put some of the more well-known boards to shame," Julius told XBIZ in 2006, for a laudatory feature headlined “Renaissance Man.” "This is not to brag, but my retention is fantastic, some advertisers have been with me for three years or so. The way I look at it is, I am only as good as my last show, so I bust my ass at every one to bring value for the advertising dollar."
The Record Keeper of Online Adult
The first printed issue of “FUBAR Webmasters” magazine prominently featured a calendar of all the upcoming shows, a globetrotting to-do list that fed into Julius’ obsession to document every single one of them. At the shows, camera in hand, Julius became a sort of living embodiment of the community itself.
“You knew you were in the right place if Julius was standing there with a camera,” Battleship Stance’s Jason Tucker, a veteran of the webmaster community, told XBIZ. “He was the record keeper of the online adult space since its inception. He captured amazing moments of most of our 20s and 30s.”
“For more than a decade,” XBIZ wrote in 2014, “JFK of FUBARWebmasters.com has been practically everywhere that an adult industry trade show, private party or insider event has taken place. JFK sets out to capture the feel of each event while creating a living record of the fun and business being done around the world.”
That profane gruffness that coexisted with his helpfulness and generosity served him well on the road and allowed him to suffer only a minimal number of fools.
“It’s funny: people saw him as being grumpy, but he was smiling all the time,” Sandy said. “After the memorial and the things people wrote on Facebook, I could feel how much people appreciated him. Everyone remembered him as a great guy they all looked for to start the show and to finish the show.”
According to his wife, Julius was “very opinionated, but he also listened to what everyone had to say, and if you made more sense, he would be willing to change his mind.”
Another thing that was noted after his passing: “Everyone was amazed at his stamina, the energy that it took to do everything, to be everywhere.”
Known to All of Us
As Playboy’s Holly Ruprecht wrote on Facebook, “Julius or JFK was known to all of us” as the man “who loved the business and captured it throughout the years.”
The moveable feast that Julius took from show to show included a gallery of usual suspects, led by Payout Magazine’s Mike B., with whom Julius had a volatile — and loving — camaraderie.
“Mikey was one of the few people Julius would even allow to touch his camera,” Sandy pointed out. “He was always so careful with it.”
“When I met Julius,” Mike B. told XBIZ after the memorial, “I was the publisher for Klixxx Magazine and Julius was just starting FUBAR. I was also the photographer for Klixxx magazine and that is why we got along so well.”
Mike B. describes their relationship as “unbelievable.”
“We were competitors but best of friends at the shows and also outside the shows,” he said. “I was actually the person Julius came to when he wanted to do his FUBAR magazine — he had no idea how to put a magazine together. I had been the publisher for PlayTime magazine for seven years, so I knew all the ins and outs of the publishing business. So, while I was doing Klixxx for Joey I was also publishing and printing FUBAR for Julius! That is one hell of a relationship.”
Mike B. described Julius as “truly a mentor — behind that rough exterior, and all his yelling, was a heart of gold. He was always there to help and give advice to anyone in the business who needed it. He was always thinking of new ideas for his business to improve.”
“It's safe to say that his photos helped significantly boost the careers and brands for many in our industry,” Joey Gabra, who shared Julius’ passion for live music and photography, wrote on Facebook. “Of all the trade shows I attended all over the world, he was often the first person I saw when I arrived and the last person I saw when I was leaving — and each time I saw him, whether I was coming or going, I was met with a giant hug.”
Veteran webmaster Stewart Tongue described on Facebook a scenario where he “was arranging a private gathering, and the room the show provided suddenly was unavailable. Julius hosted the party in his hotel room instead. He somehow had a full bar set up and we crammed 25 people into his room for a few hours. He made it feel like it was a grand event somehow.”
“I can’t imagine going to a red carpet and not seeing him alongside Mari Blue, Mike B. and Buster Brown,” wrote Ophelia Marcus.
Steve Lightspeed summarized what he called “one of Julius Kedvessy's great legacies” and “the intentional gift he gave to everyone in the adult industry.”
“With his camera,” Lightspeed wrote, “he made us all look like rockstars, and feel like celebrities. He was like our version of David — traveling the world to document the wild creatures of the adult industry in our natural habitats.”
By doing so, he continued, Julius “shared so many good times with us [and] turned us into a weird extended family — an amazing kinship lasting over 20 years, with friendships forged all over the world.”
“The 1,000,000 smiles on the FUBAR website are all directed at Julius,” Lightspeed concluded, summing up this unique Hungarian-Canadian’s legacy perfectly.
Off to the Big Show
The October 1 Facebook announcement of his passing was written in true JFK style:
“Husband, father and all around stubborn asshole, his personality was larger than life and nothing could slow him down. Julius was forever on the run with various projects and businesses to occupy his time, constantly filled with new ideas of what new adventure he could partake in.
“He was forever quietly doing things to help others without ever wanting any credit for himself. Even if he was incredibly opinionated he was always his most authentic self.
“There is so much more and not enough words to describe the man that Julius was.
“He is survived by his wife of over 46 years Sandra Kane and his three children Alex Kedvessy, Diana Cerovich and Nicole Kedvessy as well as their partners. He will also be greatly missed by his brother Laszlo, his sister Eniko and his grandchildren, nieces and nephews, as well as so many friends and family all over the world.
“He is leaving every single one of us telling him to ‘Fuck off’ one last time.”
For Steve Lightspeed, the jet-setting, cigar and flashbulbs life of this “beloved documentarian, friend and mentor” — and unrepentant “stubborn asshole” — was a life well-lived.
“This was not a business for Julius,” added Mike B. “It was his family. ”
XBIZ Founder and Publisher Alec Helmy described Julius as “a dear friend to so many, a true gentleman of the business and an iconic figure of the webmaster community.”
“A trade show without his presence felt incomplete,” Helmy added. “I will miss him dearly.”
As for his companion of 49 years, still in the this-can’t-be-real daze of the immediate aftermath, the feelings naturally run deep.
“Right now, it feels like he’s away to one of the shows, especially because it’s the fall,” Sandy told XBIZ.
“It feels like in a few days, I’m going to go to the airport to pick him up.”
