E-Mail This Article to a Friend H BOMB BRINGS CAMPUS COITUS Making it — and making out — at Harvard BY CAMILLE DODERO

"Look at Kasia in front of the cameras," said Paul, a 20-year-old who could pass for Jared Leto’s younger brother, motioning across the room. It was a Monday evening at Harvard Square’s Redline restaurant, this was a launch party for Harvard’s brand-spanking-new literary-sex publication, H Bomb Magazine, and the young woman facing the cameras was H Bomb editor in chief and co-founder Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg, a Harvard soon-to-be-junior whom pals call Kasia. "Kasia’s made it," cooed Paul. "She’s really made it."

A pretty young pixie nestled beside Paul narrowed her eyes. "Do you need cameras to ‘make it’?"

"Conceptually, no, you don’t need cameras to ‘make it,’" Paul informed her. "But conventionally, yes. If you’ve ‘made it,’ cameras will come."

So Cieplak-von Baldegg and H Bomb’s other co-founder, editor at large Camilla Hrdy, had "made it" simply by merging two concepts into one publication: sex and Harvard. The attention started last winter. After the university’s Committee on College Life approved the biannual literary-arts journal, the Harvard Crimson labeled the publication "porn," and the national media picked up on the story. So tonight, the night before H Bomb’s premiere issue would finally filter onto the Ivy-encrusted campus, sundry local media materialized for interviews. Reporters trailed Cieplak-von Baldegg and Hrdy, scribbling down answers to softball questions that would appear in the next morning’s dailies. The WB 56 network turned up, asking the co-founders to pose with copies of their student-run sex magazine — but since this was for television, could they strategically place their hands so as to cover the nude woman’s apple-bottom pictured on the front cover? They obliged.

But sitting down amid the squeal of skinny, well-coifed Harvard kids calculating their evening’s alcohol consumption (it was only 7:30 p.m., but there was complimentary beer), Cieplak-von Baldegg and Hrdy seemed unfazed. "We’re both from Cambridge, so we were townies before we were Harvard students," explained Cieplak-von Baldegg, clad in a black stretch tee and candy-apple-red pants. "We have a hard time taking ourselves seriously." She hesitated. "I kinda feel like we’ve pulled off a big practical joke," she admitted, looking over at Hrdy. "People save lives, do community service, conduct groundbreaking research [at Harvard], and we’re the ones who get the attention! That’s beyond me."

H Bomb isn’t Girls Gone Wild by way of Playboy — it’s more like Nerve’s younger, nerdier sibling. There’s a critical guide to condoms, a first-person meditation on the sexual experiences of a female S.L.U.T. (Sexually Liberated Urban Twentysomething), and a detailed account of a heady Craigslist.org rendezvous. Along with poetry and fiction, there’s also a lot of talk about therapy, depression, and how both relate to sexuality — H Bomb’s contributors seem to paint the university’s psychological atmosphere as more like a booby hatch than an Ivory Tower.

Of course, no one reads Playboy for the articles. "We like to think we’re starting a revolution in terms of how people think and talk about sex," says Cieplak-von Baldegg. "But, um, they probably just want to see Harvard students naked." And there are naked students in H Bomb: bare butts, women’s breasts, provocatively photographed treasure trails, a couple of crotches, and even a flaccid male member (in an advertisement for a nude photographer). But most of the images are playful, even goofy — like the centerfold spread, which is a panoramic shot of 12 college-age models (eight males, four females) in various states of undress: one young man wearing half a tuxedo cradles an anatomically correct blow-up doll; a kneeling French maid looks away from a pantsless young man’s crotch; a topless young woman straddles a male with a whip in his teeth. Hrdy says it’s H Bomb’s policy not to discuss the identity of models, but the launch party was a little like human bird-watching, with H Bomb as a manual: There’s the half-naked kid biting the whip! I think I see the purple-wig woman over there! Is that the guy in the tub?

"It’s really easy to take yourself too seriously if you go here," said Cieplak-von Baldegg, explaining H Bomb’s tone. "It’s also easy not to take yourself seriously at all. So we’re trying to capture all of that in H Bomb."

A svelte fella with a shaggy brown mane plunked down a full champagne glass in front of the two women. "A gift to share," he said and then slid into the next booth. When Cieplak-von Baldegg and Hrdy soon got up to mingle, the champagne-bearer told Paul, the Jared Leto look-alike, how he planned to "make it." "I’m going to travel the world and then be a rock star," he explained. "But you have to work your ass to be a rock star."

"There’s your ass," said Paul, pointing across the table to the bare black-and-white male buttocks on H Bomb’s front cover. "And dude, you’re working it."

To get your copy of H Bomb Magazine, visit www.h-bomb.org.