Sue Johanson, the blunt, bawdy and cherished Canadian intercourse educator and host of the long-running tv call-in program “Sunday Evening Intercourse Display” and its American counterpart, “Communicate Intercourse With Sue Johanson,” died on June 28 at a care facility in North Toronto. She was once 92.

Her dying was once showed via her daughter Jane Johanson.

Sue Johanson dressed demurely, incessantly in blazers and wire-rimmed glasses, however she had a comic’s timing and instincts, which defused the hot-button subjects she addressed. (In demonstrations, she had some way of stretching out condoms — she was once an evangelist for them — that recalled a clown making balloon animals.)

And prefer Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the Holocaust survivor and onetime Israeli sniper became intercourse therapist, Ms. Johanson, a registered nurse and mom of 3 who had run a beginning keep watch over sanatorium in a public highschool for just about twenty years, changed into a media megastar in midlife.

“I wasn’t younger,” she mentioned in “Intercourse With Sue,” a 2022 documentary about her directed via Lisa Rideout, with Jane as her mom’s interlocutor and the movie’s ingenious marketing consultant. “I wasn’t gorgeous. I didn’t have bodacious tatas. I used to be a mom with a load of data.”

Is it bizarre to place frame glitter for your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it protected to have intercourse in a scorching bathtub? May a Ziploc baggie function a condom? If condoms are left in a automobile and so they freeze, are they nonetheless just right? Solutions: No. No (chlorinated water is just too harsh for genitals, specifically ladies’s). Indubitably no longer. And sure, after they’ve been defrosted.

Each Sunday night time, the questions poured in about instantly intercourse, homosexual intercourse, masturbation and all means of fetishes, fantasies and fears. On the display’s top, within the early 2000s, just about 100,000 calls had been fielded and screened via operators, despite the fact that handiest 10 or 12 made it at the air on a given night time.

Producers of intercourse toys despatched their wares via the boxload. Ms. Johanson would divvy them up amongst her younger team for highway exams — “The Unofficial Intercourse Toy Trying out Facility of Canada,” she referred to as them — and display their options at her table, attaining into her “scorching stuff” bag, a black tote emblazoned with flames, to tug out the newest choices. “The great, the unhealthy and the unsightly,” she favored to mention. (Makers tended to gild the lily, like the corporate that made a vibrator with a digital camera at its tip. “It offers an entire new which means to, ‘I’m in a position for my close-up,’” Ms. Johanson deadpanned.)

A kid of the Nice Despair, she was once thrifty and cost-conscious, and she or he incessantly introduced do-it-yourself choices. Why no longer flip your mobile phone ringer to vibrate, tuck it for your underpants and feature your folks name nonstop?

“I have in mind her giving a hand task to a cucumber,” Russell Peters, the Canadian comic, mentioned within the documentary. “I by no means checked out a cucumber the similar.”

Ms. Johanson began her broadcasting occupation in radio with a wildly well-liked display on a rock station that ran for greater than a decade. “Sunday Evening Intercourse Display” first aired on Canadian tv in 1996. In 2002, the Oxygen community commissioned an American model, which ran proper after the Canadian display, so American callers can have their shot. The U.S. target market was once shyer and extra naïve than her Canadian audience, Ms. Johanson instructed Mireya Navarro of The New York Occasions in 2004; they gave the impression to lack fundamental wisdom. Many younger feminine callers questioned if they may get pregnant from oral intercourse.

“Ms. Johanson mentioned she may just no longer experience the subway or stand in a grocery line in Canada with out being approached to reply to the type of query that will make even the frozen hen blush,” Ms. Navarro wrote. “However in the US, a miles larger marketplace, her rising fan base turns out nearly bashful however most commonly thankful. ‘I in finding that American citizens are so well mannered and so respectful that being identified is superb,’ she mentioned. ‘Folks will have a look at me and say, “Hello, I really like your display.” And that’s the place it ends.”

She was once, on the other hand, feted at the American talk-show circuit, showing with Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, whom she terrified one night time with the contents of her hot-stuff bag: It incorporated a vibrating rubber duck, a dildo she strapped to her chin and a home made, hand-operated vibrator that she had shaped from a tin can fitted with Bubble Wrap and a tube sock.

“You’re like a perverted MacGyver,” Mr. O’Brien mentioned, horrified.

“I regard intercourse as a present from God,” Ms. Johanson instructed Ms. Navarro. “We’re the one ones that actually are in a position to experience intercourse, so we have now a duty to be told about it and experience it.”

Susan Avis Bailey Powell was once born on July 29, 1930, in Toronto. Her mom, Ethel (Bell) Powell, was once a homemaker. Her father, Wilfred Bailey Powell, was once within the Royal Canadian Air Pressure and had a lot of jobs. Her mom died when Sue was once 10, and she or he was once raised most commonly via an aunt.

She met Ejnor Karl Johanson, {an electrical} inspector, on a blind date simply ahead of she entered nursing college on the St. Boniface Medical institution in Winnipeg; they married within the early Nineteen Fifties and moved to Toronto to take over her aunt’s actual property trade.

Ms. Johanson opened her beginning keep watch over sanatorium in 1970, after a chum of her eldest daughter changed into pregnant in highschool and had an abortion, which was once most commonly unlawful in Canada on the time. “Children become involved with intercourse with out their folks’ consent,” she instructed a reporter in 1983, “and due to this fact they must be capable of get contraceptives with out their consent.”

All the way through her occupation, highschool and school scholars had been her largest worry. She was once an indefatigable speaker, a standard in school freshman orientations every fall and at loads of prime colleges every yr. Her husband, Jane Johanson mentioned, was once a reserved, personal guy, the other of his gregarious spouse, however he treated her occupation and reputation with grace and “took it like a champ.” He died in 2014.

Along with her daughter Jane, Ms. Johanson is survived via any other daughter, Carol Howard; two grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Her son, Eric, died in 2021.

Ms. Johanson additionally wrote {a magazine} column and was once the creator of 3 books: “Intercourse, Intercourse and Extra Intercourse,” “Intercourse Is Completely Herbal however Now not Naturally Absolute best” and “Communicate Intercourse: Solutions to Questions You Can’t Ask Your Oldsters.”

In 2000, she was once awarded the Order of Canada, the rustic’s very best honor for pioneers of their box.

Ms. Johanson’s Canadian display went off the air in 2005, and the American model in 2008. It was once time: The web had grow to be the go-to supply for intercourse inquiries. As Dan Savage, the intercourse columnist, put it within the documentary about Ms. Johanson, there was once a Wikipedia web page for each and every piece of apparatus and each and every intercourse act, and Ms. Johanson felt she was once not able to stay alongside of the days. At 77, she was once in a position however unhappy to name it quits.

“There will likely be a perfect large hollow in my middle,” she mentioned as she offered her ultimate episode in Might 2008, her voice breaking. “I really like doing this display.”

She added, “I’ll shut with the similar condom quickie that we ended the primary display with 174 episodes in the past: Intercourse will likely be sweeter, when you wrap your peter.”