Sexual, Revolutionary 

The first sex column in a college newspaper was conceived amid a political uproar that had nothing to do with sex or the column at all. On November 3, 1996, after a “very heated discussion,” the eleven member editorial board of The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley, voted six to five in favor of running a staff editorial endorsing state Proposition 209, which called, in part, for the elimination of race, ethnicity, and gender preferences in public university admission decisions. The conservative stance of the editorial, published the next day on the newspaper’s front page, above the fold, enraged the more liberal minded undergraduates on the University of California’s flagship campus, known for its pro-Affirmative-Action policies and liberal politics dating back to the much publicized, student led free speech movements of the 1960s.

More than four thousand copies of the newspaper carrying the editorial were stolen soon after they were distributed, according to Michael Coleman, the newspaper’s editor in chief at the time. He and his staff decided to reprint the editorial on the front page of the following issue, published on Election Day, November 5, when the proposition was scheduled to be voted upon. Just after dawn, as soon as the delivery trucks had distributed the papers to the two hundred sixty drop-off points across campus and around town, thieves made off with the newspaper’s entire press run of twenty-four thousand copies, an organized pilfering that the Student Press Law Center later documented as the largest recorded newspaper theft in college journalism history.

On November 7 a group of student protesters rushed angrily up the stairs of Eshleman Hall to the entrance of the sixth floor Daily Californian newsroom, soon after ripping thousands of copies of the paper to shreds and tossing them off a fifth floor balcony. Coleman later received an anonymous death threat on his phone’s voicemail, connecting the thefts and protest with the editorial, warning him to “watch his back” and more carefully “consider what stances you take. Don’t ever try bringing that white boy network around here, motherfucker.” The next morning the exterior walls of the house he roomed in were vandalized with a chalked message: “Fuck the Daily Cal.”

More than a week later, still operating under the swirl of controversy which the editorial, politically fueled protest, and thefts had provoked, features editor Matthew Belloni and opinion editor David Katz, both UC Berkeley seniors at the time, were relaxing in the Daily Californian newsroom. With the south side of campus framed in the large windows behind them, a borrowed boom box nearby blasting music from the local alternative rock radio station, and their editorial work for that evening’s deadline complete, the pair’s discussion of Proposition 209 turned to talk of “Ask Isadora,” a sex column that ran for almost two decades in The San Francisco Bay Guardian, an alternative weekly popular among students.

While “marveling at the shamelessness of the column,” Katz said Belloni suggested running a student version, “less raunchy, gossipy, and snarky and more clinical … something to increase reader interest but also actually provide good advice.” The key to the success of such an enterprise, Belloni remembered the pair agreeing, was that it would tackle a topic that was the polar opposite from politics, in terms of the depth and intensity of related student attitudes.

“The proposed sex column was very different,” said Belloni, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1997 and is now an entertainment lawyer in Santa Monica, California. “We knew those people who were storming our halls wouldn’t be up in arms about sex. Berkeley’s a weird place. It’s more politically explosive than anything else. Sex is just accepted, in all forms… So, for all the risk, we knew we needed something at the time that would not be at the center of any larger student controversy or media storm like we were still experiencing with the editorial fallout. We really didn’t think it would be a big deal at all.”

Currently, less than ten years after the column’s debut, Belloni’s prediction is fascinating—for the irony of its immense modesty. Far from uncontroversial, the college newspaper sex column has instead greatly overshadowed the political brouhaha from which it sprung, becoming one of the most publicized, electrifying, and divisive phenomena in student journalism at the higher education level nationwide.

Specifically, no other single entity in the modern day college journalism universe has stirred so much simultaneous interest and admonishment, fame and notoriety, fear and fervent support. Sex columns have single handedly, and dramatically, upped certain newspapers’ circulation numbers and publications’ website hits. They have helped launch the literary careers of at least two students and placed more than a half dozen others in the national media spotlight. And amid all the attention, they have sparked a debate on college and university campuses and in the general public about sex’s proper place in the world of higher education and its possible consequences for student journalism as a whole.

Within this sphere, The Daily Californian has been cited in multiple national news media outlets, including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Atlantic Monthly, as the first college newspaper to run a sex column and a principal impetus for other student journalists at schools across the United States to start their own columns, leading such fare to soon multiply like a jackrabbit. Currently more than ten percent of newspapers that are members of the Associated Collegiate Press run some type of sex column, including “Sex Goddess” in The Stanford Daily, “Sex and the (Elm) City” in The Yale Daily News, and “Sex on the Hilltop” in The Georgetown Hoya.

The Column: Content and Creation

According to the individuals who conceived it, the main resistance to the newly proposed column centered on the fact that such an explicit topic had a mostly alternative news pedigree. While mainstream relationship advice maven Ann Landers (real name Esther Lederer) is most often credited with first bringing issues of sex and sexuality into American homes, via her eponymous syndicated column which began in 1955 and appeared for close to fifty years in roughly twelve hundred newspapers, the most direct forerunners to The Daily Californian column included such features as Dan Savage’s graphic “Savage Love” and Isadora Alman’s rather titillating “Ask Isadora,” which both ran, along with a host of others, in mainly alternative publications.

The more extreme nature of the columns cited by Katz, Belloni, and Coleman as models, especially when coupled with the offbeat nature of the publications in which these columns appeared, concerned some current and past staffers, with a few former editors still in the loop calling former managing editor Erin Allday and Coleman to complain that they were squandering the newspaper’s tradition of serious editorial work. “It’s important to understand that we took ourselves very seriously back then, and that this column was definitely not viewed as serious journalism type behavior,” Allday said. “We had just come off a period of major financial problems. We had been down to publishing two days a week and had just come back to doing five days. For awhile, we had not been the newspaper we wanted to be. We wanted to take ourselves seriously, since we hadn’t been able to for so long…and so, okay, yes, a sex column’s cute and funny, but…I definitely asked myself at first, ‘What purpose does it serve?’”

Coleman, particularly, was persistent that the purpose of such fare was to be interesting and to better acquaint the publication with the true passions and thought processes of modern day students. “So much stuff that’s published in a college paper is super dull,” Coleman said almost nine years after the column’s introduction. “You know, the story of what goes into a city council meeting or how the water polo team did last night. So, I liked the idea that a sex column would be a little provocative on purpose, to really get at the heart of what students actually talked about and cared about.”

He believed that for many higher education enrollees at the time, sex was viewed as being as relevant to college life as learning to live with a roommate or dealing with tuition. The cultural touchstones and larger trends of the time seemed to correspond with his line of thinking. Specifically, a variety of mediated events, such as news coverage of the 1980s AIDS epidemic, MTV’s explicit mid-’ 90s advice show Loveline, and commercials for sexual enhancement drugs including a recurring Viagra spot featuring former U.S. Senator Bob Dole, were seen as bringing sex to the forefront of the national consciousness.

Allday, now a staff writer at California’s Santa Rosa Press Democrat, also recalled the growing murmur among editors that, more than anything else, there was value in taking a chance and covering content normally not dealt with in the college press. “We knew it was something cutting edge,” she said. “Mike [Coleman] was a smart guy in that respect. He’d done his research. We knew there weren’t any other sex columns at any other school papers, meaning ours would definitely be something innovative.”

Staffers agreed that Belloni coined the now nationally known designation, “Sex on Tuesday.” Belloni said the moniker stemmed from a sense of irony about the publication day’s otherwise humdrum reputation, along with a nod to the vibrant nature of the topic itself. “Hey, you get a bunch of twenty-year-olds together and, of course, some of the names we came up with were sort of outrageous,” said Belloni, who specifically recalled nominations such as “Give Me Sex,” “Hot Sex,” and “Sex in Class.” “After awhile though, we realized that the title didn’t have to be so out there. The subject matter was outrageous enough. We were basically calling out to the student body, ‘Hey, have sex on Tuesday.’”

The editors soon after decided that the chosen writer, while still an undergraduate student like the rest of the columnists, would have to be a person from outside the staff, someone with actual experience and knowledge in the health field. An informal, proactive search was carried out in early December, with opinion section editor Katz traveling down to the campus Tang Center, home to University Health Services, to inquire if any student volunteers involved with sexual education or women’s groups might be interested in undertaking a journalistic extension of their work. It was there that he came across Laura Lambert, a UC Berkeley senior studying to be a sex therapist.

Coleman also knew Lambert socially, and at an off-campus party a few nights after an informal interview, he officially extended an invitation for her to become the first “Sex on Tuesday” columnist. “She wasn’t a writer at the time, but she definitely knew a lot about the subject and came across as ballsy about it, in a good way, an engaging way,” Katz said. “She spoke very frankly and casually about sex stuff. She brought that kind of comfort and directness to her column.”

Throughout the sixteen pieces she wrote during the semester she served as the publication’s sex columnist, Lambert said she struggled in trying to mix the serious and oftentimes clinical content with a more humorous and entertaining writing style needed to keep students reading. “I admit I never totally cleared out an identity for myself, any type of persona,” she said.

As time passed, Lambert frequently opted to present her advice in a more straightforward and simple fashion, with wisecracks, bad puns, and raw language, and an informal, relaxed tone peppered throughout parts of the pieces. For example, she commonly used phrases such as “jerking off” and “getting off” and referred to great sex in one column as “can’t-walk-the-next-day fucking.” She similarly strove for playful simplicity in her descriptions of various sexual apparatuses or resources, including calling lubricants “tubes of fun” and referring to the protective accessory worn by males during sexual intercourse by the jokingly formal title, “Mr. Condom.”

Lambert said the occasional irreverent tone was meant to mask the controversial and explicit nature of the topics she discussed and enabled her to dig deeper into hot button social and sexual issues. In addition, she saw the casual style as doubly successful because it tended to mirror the randomness and peculiarities of the overall topics written about, such as a sarcastic question she posited in a column titled “Love Lines” on April 29, 1997, which focused on the potential downsides of phone sex. “The only true drawback I can foresee to engaging in phone sex … is call-waiting,” she wrote, highly tongue-in-cheek “How annoying would it be to have some poor telemarketing sap call up right before you’re about to come? Unless, of course, you’re into that.”

Campus and Community Reaction

In the weeks following the column’s late January 1997 debut, editors said “Sex on Tuesday” created a growing buzz and, in Lambert’s words, “a little furor every Tuesday” among the student body, faculty, administration, and members of the surrounding community. The overwhelming response was positive, said past staffers, with pockets of criticism initially coming mostly in the form of what Allday described as “outraged Grandma letters” and phone calls from a smattering of angry Berkeley residents.

Lambert, whose headshot ran prominently atop the column next to her name, said it was initially tough to deal with criticism, especially when it hit close to home. At the beginning of February 1997, she said her mother, a nurse, called to tell her that the only people who needed to know about sex related information were medical professionals and prostitutes and she did not see the point of the column since it did not address either of those parties. Lambert said her parents soon after refused to read the column and never talked about it with her again.

Lambert said the condemnation and “smut peddler” reputation she earned in certain circles were offset, in part, by the positive comments she received from students, including a casual comment from the newspaper’s webmaster that his grandmother loved the column. She said the personal recognition at times challenged her larger idealistic notion of what she wanted the column to accomplish, exemplified by a student who interrupted a student run female sexuality class she was teaching and asked her to autograph a copy of the Californian carrying her most recent column. “I remember being mad about it, and I kicked him out of the class and didn’t sign it,” she said, laughing at the memory nearly nine years later. “At twenty years old, I took myself really seriously, but I truly thought of it as writing for health advocacy and I didn’t want to give myself a big head that would overshadow the content and so I tried to avoid all the recognition that came with it.”

Far from engaging in similar avoidance behavior, the recognition bestowed upon the column, both positive and negative, on campus and within the outside community, prompted the editorial board to decide unanimously to renew it the following semester. “We didn’t want it to just be ‘Sex on Tuesday by Laura Lambert,’” Coleman said. “We wanted it to live on and be an institutional or icon-like thing, and it’s great to hear now it’s endured all these years later.”

Since the column’s debut, this iconic, pioneering status has been confirmed by dozens of leading news media outlets reporting upon the college newspaper sex column phenomenon, with “Sex on Tuesday” regularly identified as the longest running sex column and by far the most well known and influential of the columns that have been run in recent years in student newspapers nationwide. Katz said the staff’s chief legacy with the sex column should be related to nothing more than its recognition of, and courage to act upon, the obvious. “When you’re in college, it’s probably the most sexually charged time of your life,” he said. “Mondays, Tuesdays, any day of the week, you can’t go wrong talking about it. We were just the first ones to realize that fact. I mean, it’s not rocket science. It’s sex.”

is a mass communication doctoral candidate and Scripps Howard Teaching Fellow in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. He earned his master’s degree in journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pa., and is currently completing his dissertation on the American college newspaper sex column phenomenon.