Simon James Honey (born 23 May 1956), better known as Ben Dover, is an English pornographic actor, director and producer. He has also worked under several other pseudonyms including Steve Perry as producer and Lindsay Honey as an actor and musician.
Honey was included in Larry Flynt's Hustler's Top 50 Most Hated People in Porn list, printed in the January 1999 issue and in 2011, he was inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame.
Honey has also won a host of awards for the Ben Dover series including the Breakthrough Award at the AVN Awards in 1997, AVN's Best Gonzo Award twice (in 2000 for Ben Dover's End Games and in 2002 for Ben Dover's The Booty Bandit). In 2006, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the UK Adult Film Awards, which he co-presented with Kristyn Halborg, Kelly Stafford and co-star Pascal White.
In 2012, Honey was nominated by the Internet Service Providers Association as an Internet Villain for his involvement with his company Golden Eye (International) in speculative invoicing.
Biography
Early days in the music industry
Born in Sittingbourne, Kent to Sylvia (née Foster) (1926–2017) and Frank Cyril Honey (1921–1993), Honey attended Borden Grammar School. Following expulsion from school in 1973, he moved to Newquay, Cornwall where he worked as a children's entertainer called "Uncle Simon" and drummed in a cabaret band for the summer season.
Using the pseudonym Lindsay Honey as he "didn't think Simon fitted the bill somehow", he began working as a session drummer for artists such as Edison Lighthouse and White Plains. Honey joined Artful Dodgers who released one single "Here We Go" in 1978 before changing their name to 20th Century Heroes.
Following a chance meeting between the band's guitarist Paul Jackson and one time Bay City Rollers bassist Ian Mitchell (who replaced original member Alan Longmuir in 1976, before quitting after seven months) in a taxi, the band (Jackson, Honey and bassist John Jay) agreed to be his backing band and The Ian Mitchell Band was launched in May 1979. Although the band did not take off in the UK, they released three studio albums within a single year and toured across Europe and Japan. Following the departure of Jackson, the band changed their name to La Rox and reinvented themselves as a glam rock band, with Honey becoming the band's keyboard player. The change made little impact on the band's fortunes in the UK, and they split up in 1982. Honey, along with the band's second drummer John Towe and guitarist Lea Hart (who had replaced Paul Jackson) scored a minor UK hit with the one-off single "Small Ads" released in April 1981 under the name the "Small Ads".
Honey also worked as a cabaret singer under the pseudonym "Steve Jackson" and briefly reunited with Mitchell to form "Bachelor Of Hearts" who released one album in 1983 to little fanfare (a version of the track "Girls in Jeans" was later used as the outro music on Ben Dover films).
Early adult film work
In 1978, broke from his dwindling career as a musician and working as a male stripper using the stage name "Hot Rod" (due to his reported likeness to Rod Stewart at the time), Honey responded to an advertisement for models in The Stage newspaper and met agent Kent William Boulton (1941–2002), a college lecturer from Bromley and former Labour Party candidate on the Isle of Wight who entered the porn business late in life and was renowned for organising "spanking parties".
Being paid £150 a shoot, Honey started working for Berth Milton Sr, publisher of Private Magazine and other European hardcore porn magazines such as Rodox/Color Climax, a Danish company. His first shoot was with a then 17-year-old Eileen Daly, who had gone to see the same agent above a strip club in Soho with her mother. Honey was introduced by Boulton to the photographer Lexington Steel and director Mike Freeman.
Working for Videx Ltd. Honey began working as an actor for Mike Freeman's Videx Ltd. in 1980, a video production company based in Wimbledon. Freeman had produced softcore porn throughout the 1960s via his company Climax Films, and employed well known Soho gangster Gerald Patrick Joseph Hawley as a bodyguard. He was jailed in December 1969 for the murder of Hawley, reportedly after he tried to take over Freeman's business.