She’s Bawdy, She’s Zany, She’s Pushing Safer Sex

Like an Italianate Dr. Ruth stuck on fast forward, Suzi Landolphi is skipping around on the lawn in front of the Cal Poly Pomona bookstore, talking sexy, flinging blue condoms into the air, having a marvelous time.

“Don’t you just love that word?” she says. “Don’t you think it sounds Italian? Gen-i- tal -ia. It’s like an Italian liqueur. Let’s see, you ordered the Amaretto, you had the Galliano and yours is the . . . Genitalia, right? You want it on the rocks or straight up?”

Passing students are giggling hard, threatening to drop their books. Many decide to stop and listen as Landolphi, 39, all 5 feet, 1 inch of her, dressed in turquoise leopard-skin print spandex pants, a stretched-out T-shirt and high-top jogging shoes, steamrolls them with high-voltage sexual truth, giddy blasts of earthy humor and a simple but effective demonstration of the properties of condoms.

She has been at it since January, making paid appearances on college campuses mostly in the East, talking about how to bring more knowledge and understanding, and less confusion and viruses, into bed.

Her one-woman show, called “Hot, Sexy and Safer,” arrived at Cal Poly Tuesday as part of that university’s AIDS awareness campaign. It was the first stop on the five-campus Southern California leg of her national tour. (She is scheduled to appear at Cal State Long Beach at noon today.)

The subject was safe sex, without the thou-shalt-nots. Landolphi did cover the list of ways to become exposed to and to prevent AIDS, but rather than dwell on the clinical, she went careening off into the more fanciful. Around the medical information was spun a wildly uninhibited sexual primer for the possibly bewildered young adult of the late ‘80s, awash in a sea of sexual anxiety and misinformation.

“That’s the whole essence of what I do,” she says later. “It takes more courage and guts to practice safer sex, but it can be more satisfying. We’re so quick to judge that if something’s safer, it’s not fun.”

Landolphi says that, for college and university students right now, AIDS prevention needs to focus basically on safe sexual practices, a fact of which school administrators are aware.

“The administrators in the schools very much want me to talk about AIDS in relationship to safer sex,” Landolphi says, but it’s not called an AIDS lecture. “If we did that, no one would show up. I talk about AIDS, but we call it provocative and zany and we use comedy.”

Good sex is not limited to practices that can endanger one’s health, she says.

“I think the sexual revolution made everything kinky again, everything we used to do in between. Nobody pets anymore. Nobody even says the word pet anymore. It’s very satisfying, but no one does it. They go right to intercourse.”

The root of the problem, she says, is a seemingly universal lack of communication, honesty and trust between sexual partners, which leads to inevitable confusion, misunderstanding and fumbling.

“Around the country people ask me if there’s any difference between people from the East or West, or the North or South. I say, ‘Nah, people are having bad sex everywhere.’ ”

Bad sex for Landolphi is sex that is unsafe, sex by rote, or sex that lacks an element of playfulness. It’s that last one that is Landolphi’s hook to focus attention on the others. She uses it to attract a crowd of about 200 in Cal Poly’s University Park area within the first few minutes of her 75-minute ramble.

There is practically no escape into euphemism for those who stop to listen.

She explains, for instance:

--The essential differences among a number of condom designs.

--How communication between sexual partners can go awry. (“We need to start to talk right from the beginning. As women to women and men to men, we don’t tell the truth to each other. Maybe safe sex is just bringing back honesty.”)

--How “there are 2,862 ways to satisfy both yourself and your partner. Know how I know? I’m up to 1,908.”

All in all, it’s pretty frank stuff from a woman who says she once wanted to be a minister.

“I did end up being a kind of minister, though,” she says.

A former film and video producer, Landolphi began doing volunteer work with the AIDS Action Committee in Boston, where she was taught how to educate audiences about AIDS and its prevention. She chose to do her speaking in local high schools.

This January, she decided to escalate to college audiences, spruce up the presentation with comedy and lots of frank adult talk, and take the show on the road. She said she speaks at between 20 and 25 colleges each month to audiences that sometimes number 2,000 or more.

It’s all part of a process Landolphi says is designed to break a kind of sexual logjam.

“People will come up to me after a show,” she says, “and say that they were just stuck sexually. Maybe they just didn’t have the courage to make changes. Or all the talk they’ve heard is the old condom-or-a-casket stuff.”

Though her frank talk at Cal Poly occasionally caused some edgy laughter and a few averted eyes, the reactions afterward were positive.

“She was very effective,” said Douglas Lin, commissioner of programming for Cal Poly’s Associated Students Inc., the sponsor of the event. “(The audience) responded a lot better to her than they would to someone saying that if you don’t use a condom you’ll die. It was lighthearted, but the message still came across.”

Sometimes, however, eyebrows do rise.

“I don’t get any (bad reactions) after I talk,” says Landolphi. “I’ll occasionally get it before. Some people think I’m here to promote sex and promiscuity. I’m asking them to consider getting more information based on truth.

“There was one woman in Modesto who didn’t mind my talking about intercourse or anything else, but she said, ‘I can’t believe you came to talk about masturbation.’ ”

She says she didn’t always come off like your crazy, bawdy older sister. Her Hot, Sexy and Safer persona “grew as I grew. It’s an exaggerated form of me. It’s part little girl, part brassy Italian and part professional educator.”

The current sexual mine field, says Landolphi, is “a storm, and we’ve got to hold each other’s hands and take care of each other and go through it together.” But, she says, there’s no reason you can’t have fun on the trip.