Sex Talk

Sex Talk has been running on their own for a long time -- it's just been an institution," WRCT radio General Manager Amaury Rolin recently told City Paper. "We just give them a producer and stick 'em on the air."

Carnegie Mellon University's long-standing tradition, Sex Talk, is straight talk about sex … sort of. Sex Talk airs on the school's radio station, WRCT 88.3 FM, from 11 p.m. to midnight every Tuesday. Interestingly, and atypically of college radio shows, it has survived independent of its hosts.

"Like a sexually transmitted disease, the show is hard to get rid of," Jeff Smith, one of the show's current co-hosts, says.

"And it mutates," Corey Kosak, a longtime co-host, hastens to add.

Kosak has been involved with the show since 1997. First a caller, then a guest, Kosak eventually became a guest host. Today he and Smith run the show, which still features guests and callers, and, more importantly, the promise of intense satisfaction -- a fulfillment derived from getting all the jokes. No matter what the topic, it's accompanied by dry wit and a certain compelling erotic tension.

What follows is an excerpt of our conversation after a recent live show:

KOSAK: There's been a long tradition of doing the show, but this is really very different. They'd have hot, sexy cheerleaders come on and it was very heterosexually and love advice-oriented. They definitely did not have our appetite for macabre. We actively seek out people who are more fringey.

CP: How do you come up with topics for the show?

KOSAK: It's part of my love/hate relationship with the show. It's part effort/part serendipity. The thing that we do that works, but is toxic when we have no guest, is play it by ear.

SMITH: We have people who are regulars, who we know will be great guests, like Johncam, or Sharon "Mama" Spell.

CP: Do you have a favorite show?

SMITH: The Jason one. We had a phone interview with a software engineer who does porn on the weekends. We had him walk us through a day on a shoot -- everything from the cast meeting at Jack in the Box to the showers at the end.

KOSAK: The key to understanding my relationship with the show has to do with my own reluctant exhibitionism. In some sense, I don't want the show to be about me, but I end up delighted when it ends up being about me. I think my favorite show is when we had [our favorite S&M couple] on, and they ended up flogging me. He flogged me.

SMITH: Yeah, that was a great show. I saw them at the play party -- well, admittedly they were half-dressed at that point -- but if you saw them at the Giant Eagle, you wouldn't give them a second look.

CP: The play party?

KOSAK: That's what they call an S&M get-together. It is a party in every respect, there's chips and conversation. And there're these little stations. Like the whipping station? The pissing station?

SMITH: It's pretty vanilla S&M, except for that one couple.

KOSAK: The suffocation play, right. This woman was in a giant plastic bag, and another woman was like, "I'm controlling your air now." It made me uncomfortable.

CP: What other kinds of tricks have you learned?

KOSAK: The funny things about the show are not necessarily what we find out, but just the little things that happen along the way. Like at the Arena [Pittsburgh's only gay bathhouse]. The thing that was especially funny was that co-host Peter was there, he's a really big guy, football-player-sized guy. Somehow he got the towel the size of a piece of paper, and no matter what he did, some sexy part of his anatomy was exposed. He was sort of the straight one, the one that was most uncomfortable about the whole thing but trying to be a good sport, and yet he got the tiny towel.

CP: Is there a worst show?

SMITH: We've had some very serious guests, and those were good shows, but some guests who aren't funny, not responding to our sort of humor. You can think of the show as a conversation. The same as a conversation would fail, the show can fail if our guest is passive, or uninteresting.

KOSAK: I don't want to say that we require our guests to be funny, but we do require some commitment. There are some people who, when they get on the show, won't get involved. I want people to talk about personal experiences, stuff they care about. I've had guests talk about all of this kinky stuff in the pre-interview, then suddenly on the radio they don't want to share. The show is really successful when people really do expose themselves a little bit. Expose their vulnerabilities to our laser. Like tonight, when I asked you about your sexual experiences, and I didn't know where it was going but you started talking abut the guy with the enormous penis.

SMITH: If you would have said, "Oh, that's too personal." The show would have died a little death. You ended up painting us a word picture of penises.

For more word pictures of penises, tune in to 88.3, WRCT. Or connect from anywhere via http://www.sex-talk.org/.

back to news
main index