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 used to be 92.

Her demise used to be 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 used to be 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 start keep an eye on health center in a public highschool for just about 20 years, become a media superstar in midlife.

“I wasn’t younger,” she stated 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 guide. “I wasn’t stunning. I didn’t have bodacious tatas. I used to be a mom with a load of knowledge.”

Is it bizarre to position frame glitter in your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it secure to have intercourse in a scorching bathtub? May just a Ziploc baggie function a condom? If condoms are left in a automobile and so they freeze, are they nonetheless excellent? Solutions: No. No (chlorinated water is simply too harsh for genitals, specifically girls’s). Certainly now not. And sure, after they’ve been defrosted.

Each Sunday night time, the questions poured in about immediately intercourse, homosexual intercourse, masturbation and all means of fetishes, fantasies and fears. On the exhibit’s height, within the early 2000s, just about 100,000 calls had been fielded and screened via operators, regardless that most effective 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 assessments — “The Unofficial Intercourse Toy Checking out Facility of Canada,” she referred to as them — and reveal their options at her table, attaining into her “scorching stuff” bag, a black tote emblazoned with flames, to tug out the newest choices. “The nice, 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 that means to, ‘I’m in a position for my close-up,’” Ms. Johanson deadpanned.)

A kid of the Nice Despair, she used to be thrifty and cost-conscious, and she or he incessantly introduced selfmade choices. Why now not flip your mobile phone ringer to vibrate, tuck it on your underpants and feature your mates name nonstop?

“I take into account her giving a hand task to a cucumber,” Russell Peters, the Canadian comic, stated within the documentary. “I by no means checked out a cucumber the similar.”

Ms. Johanson began her broadcasting profession in radio with a wildly fashionable exhibit 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 exhibit, so American callers can have their shot. The U.S. target audience used to be shyer and extra naïve than her Canadian audience, Ms. Johanson advised Mireya Navarro of The New York Instances in 2004; they perceived to lack fundamental wisdom. Many younger feminine callers puzzled if they might get pregnant from oral intercourse.

“Ms. Johanson stated she may now not experience the subway or stand in a grocery line in Canada with out being approached to respond to the type of query that may make even the frozen rooster blush,” Ms. Navarro wrote. “However in the US, a miles larger marketplace, her rising fan base turns out virtually bashful however most commonly thankful. ‘I to find that American citizens are so well mannered and so respectful that being known is glorious,’ she stated. ‘Other folks will take a look at me and say, “Hello, I really like your exhibit.” And that’s the place it ends.”

She used to be, alternatively, 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 hand-crafted, hand-operated vibrator that she had formed from a tin can fitted with Bubble Wrap and a tube sock.

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

“I regard intercourse as a present from God,” Ms. Johanson advised Ms. Navarro. “We’re the one ones that in reality are in a position to experience intercourse, so we’ve got a duty to be informed about it and experience it.”

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

She met Ejnor Karl Johanson, {an electrical} inspector, on a blind date simply sooner than she entered nursing faculty on the St. Boniface Health center in Winnipeg; they married within the early Fifties and moved to Toronto to take over her aunt’s actual property industry.

Ms. Johanson opened her start keep an eye on health center in 1970, after a chum of her eldest daughter become pregnant in highschool and had an abortion, which used to be most commonly unlawful in Canada on the time. “Youngsters become involved with intercourse with out their oldsters’ consent,” she advised a reporter in 1983, “and due to this fact they will have to have the ability to get contraceptives with out their consent.”

All through her profession, highschool and school scholars had been her largest worry. She used to be an indefatigable speaker, a standard in school freshman orientations every fall and at masses of prime faculties every yr. Her husband, Jane Johanson stated, used to be a reserved, non-public guy, the other of his gregarious spouse, however he treated her profession and status 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 used to be the creator of 3 books: “Intercourse, Intercourse and Extra Intercourse,” “Intercourse Is Completely Herbal however No longer Naturally Absolute best” and “Communicate Intercourse: Solutions to Questions You Can’t Ask Your Oldsters.”

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

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

“There can be a super giant hollow in my middle,” she stated as she offered her ultimate episode in Would possibly 2008, her voice breaking. “I really like doing this exhibit.”

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