Her television programme often featured dildos and a variety of other sex toys.

It wasn’t long before she became a well-loved Canadian sex icon for her open-minded and inquisitive approach to all things sex – including fetishes, gay sex, anal sex and other aspects of sexuality. In the early 1980s, she took her mission to the airwaves, debuting her Sunday Night Sex Show on Toronto radio station Q107.

Not long after, she began travelling around Ontario to deliver sex education to students across the province. She opened the clinic because she felt there was a lack of access to contraception in the area. She began her career as a nurse, opening a pioneering birth control clinic at her daughter’s Toronto high school in 1970, just a year after birth control became legal in Canada (and 18 years before abortion was fully legalised). Johanson was venerated as a forthright educator who filled gaping voids left by the absence of sex ed curricula at schools across Canada and the US. “She was a giant, and had such a positive impact on the lives of so many people,” wrote prominent sex advice columnist Dan Savage on Twitter. Johanson’s curly grey hair, wire-rimmed glasses and pragmatic wardrobe were a jarring contrast to her blunt, sometimes playful and often explicit takes on sexuality. Paying tribute in a post on Instagram, Rideout called Johanson “an incredible, unstoppable force” who “paved the way for how we talk about sex and sexuality today”. Lisa Rideout, the director of a 2022 documentary on Johanson titled Sex With Sue, confirmed her death on Thursday. She died in a long-term care home in Thornhill, Ontario.

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