Sue Johanson, the blunt, sassy and beloved Canadian sex educator and host of the long-running television call-in program “Sunday Night Sex Show” and its American counterpart, “Talk Sex With Sue Johanson,” died in June 28 in one care. facility in North Toronto. He is 92.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Jane Johanson.
Sue Johanson is modestly dressed, often in a blazer and wire-rimmed glasses, but she has the timing and instincts of a comedian, which offsets the heated topics she discusses. (During the demonstrations, he had a way of holding out condoms — he was an evangelist for them — that recalled a clown making wolf animals.)
And like Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the Holocaust survivor and one-time Israeli sniper turned sex therapist, Ms. Johanson, a registered nurse and mother of three who ran a birth control clinic at a public high school for nearly two decades, became a media star in midlife.
“I’m not young,” he said “Sex With Sue,” a 2022 documentary about her directed by Lisa Rideout, with Jane as her mother’s interlocutor and the film’s creative consultant. “I’m not pretty. I don’t have bodacious tatas. I am a mother with a lot of information.”
Is it weird to put body glitter on your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it safe to have sex in a hot tub? Can a Ziploc baggie double as a condom? If condoms are left in a car and they freeze, are they still good? Answers: No. No (chlorinated water is too painful for the genitals, particularly for women). Definitely not. And yes, once they are defrosted.
Every Sunday night, questions about straight sex, gay sex, masturbation and all kinds of fetishes, fantasies and fears pour in. At the show’s peak, in the early 2000s, operators fielded and screened nearly 100,000 calls, although only 10 or 12 made it out on a given night.
Sex toy manufacturers ship their wares by the boxload. They will be divided by Ms. Johanson with his young crew for road tests — “The Unofficial Sex Toy Testing Facility of Canada,” he calls them — and displays their qualities on his desk, reaches for his “hot stuff” bag, a black that tote put on fire, to pull out the latest offerings. “The good, the bad and the ugly,” he likes to say. (Manufacturers often gild the lily, like the company that made a vibrator with a camera on the end of it. “It gives a whole new meaning to, ‘I’m ready for my close-up,'” quips Ms. Johanson.)
A child of the Great Depression, he was thrifty and cost-conscious, and he often presented homemade alternatives. Why not make your cellphone ring vibrate, tuck it into your underwear and call your friends non-stop?
“I remember him giving a job to a cucumber,” Russell Peters, the Canadian comedian, said in the documentary. “I never looked at a cucumber the same.”
Ms. started Johanson began his radio broadcasting career with a wildly popular show on a rock station that ran for more than a decade. The “Sunday Night Sex Show” first aired on Canadian television in 1996. In 2002, the Oxygen network commissioned an American version, which ran after the Canadian show, so that American callers could have their shot. . The US audience is more timid and more naive than her Canadian audience, Ms. Johanson to Mireya Navarro of The New York Times in 2004; they seem to lack basic knowledge. Many young callers wonder if they can get pregnant from oral sex.
“Ms. Johanson says she can’t ride the subway or stand in a grocery line in Canada without being approached to answer the kind of question that would make even a frozen chicken blush,” Ms. Navarro wrote. “But in the United States States, a bigger market, his growing fan base seems almost embarrassed but mostly appreciative. ‘I discovered that the American people are so polite and so respectful that the recognition is wonderful,’ he said. ‘People will look at me and say, “Hi, I love your show.” And that ends.”
He, however, became known on the American talk-show circuit, with Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman and Conan O’Brienthat she dreaded one night with the contents of her hot-stuff bag: It included a vibrating rubber duck, a dildo she strapped to her chin and a handmade, hand-operated vibrator she fashioned out of a can filled with Bubble Wrap and a tube sock.
“You’re like a perverted MacGyver,” said Mr. O’Brien, horrified.
“I consider sex a gift from God,” Ms. Johanson to Ms. Navarro. “We are the only ones who really enjoy sex, so we have an obligation to know about it and enjoy it.”
Susan Avis Bailey Powell was born on July 29, 1930, in Toronto. His mother, Ethel (Bell) Powell, was a homemaker. His father, Wilfred Bailey Powell, was in the Royal Canadian Air Force and had many jobs. Her mother died when Sue was 10 years old, and she was mostly raised by an aunt.
She met Ejnor Karl Johanson, an electrical inspector, on a blind date before she entered nursing school in St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg; they married in the early 1950s and moved to Toronto to take over his aunt’s real estate business.
opened by Ms. Johanson opened her birth control clinic in 1970, after a friend of her oldest daughter got pregnant in high school and had an abortion, which was mostly illegal in Canada at the time. “Children are involved in sex without their parents’ consent,” he told a reporter in 1983, “and therefore they should be able to get contraceptives without their consent.”
Throughout his career, high school and college students have been his biggest concern. He is a tireless speaker, a regular at college freshman orientations each fall and at hundreds of high schools each year. Her husband, says Jane Johanson, was a reserved, private man, the opposite of her gentle husband, but she handled her career and fame with grace and “took it like a champ.” He died in 2014.
In addition to her daughter Jane, Ms. Johanson is survived by another daughter, Carol Howard; two grandchildren; and a great-grandchild. His son Eric died in 2021.
Ms. also wrote Johanson has a column in the magazine and is the author of three books: “Sex, Sex and More Sex,” “Sex is Perfectly Natural but Not Naturally Perfect” and “Talk Sex: Answers to Questions You Can’t Ask Your Parents .”
In 2000, he was awarded the Order of Canadathe nation’s highest honor for pioneers in their field.
The Canadian show of Ms. Johanson aired in 2005, and the American version in 2008. It’s time: The internet has become the main source of sex inquiries. As Dan Savage, the sex columnist, put it in the documentary about Ms. Johanson, there is a Wikipedia page for every device and every sex act, and Ms. Johanson that he can’t keep up with the times. At 77, he was ready but sad to call it quits.
“There will be a big hole in my heart,” he said as he introduced his final episode in May 2008, his voice cracking. “I want to do this show.”
He added, “I’ll close with the same condom quickie we ended the first show with 174 episodes ago: Sex will be sweeter, if you wrap your peter.”
