(Mostly cultural analysis, focused on gay porn. But plenty of very plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
(#1)
The pizza boy archetype, as depicted by young Melbourne artist Allain de Leon in DNA Magazine, April 2013
The figure is a package of symbolic content and associations, among them: the desirable youth; the delivery figure, someone who comes to your door bearing pleasurable goods for money; pizza as an American cultural emblem of warm informal social associations; and a cluster of associations of food with sex, some more general, others specific to pizza slices and whole pizza pies
The trigger for this posting is a recent ad for C1R/Catalina Video, with a sale on a new release — Pizza Boy 4 – Slice of Pie — and the three earlier films in the series, starting with Pizza Boy: He Delivers (William Higgins, 1986). The ads, which are way XXX-rated, are available in a posting on AZBlogX (“Another slice of pizza boy”). But here: a salacious image of pizza boy Steve Henson from the first film, a classic of gay porn:
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Higgins’s 1986 pizza boy wasn’t the first guy in gay porn to come to the door with a hot pie, and a great many pizza-bearing hunks have succeeded him — some to be reported on below — but he became the classic representative of his type.
From an enthusiastic but perceptive IMDb review from 8/28/10 by Steve Farmington:
THE PIZZA BOY: HE DELIVERS. It has a great cast. While there ARE a number of rock-solid Adonis types on hand, (most notably Tony Stefano, who could never shake the expressionless “just in it for the money” vibe) there are also genuine humans such as David Ashfield and Grant Fagan. They look like everyday guys you might work or go to school with, and that makes the sex scenes feel very real.
It is not coincidence that Ashfield and Fagan headline PIZZA BOY’s two hottest scenes, which both take place in a “park” at night (read: picnic table in a dark soundstage). In the first scene Ashfield, playing the more experienced (but still boyishly innocent) role, introduces Fagan to the joys of oral gratification. Of course, Fagan responds enthusiastically (with both having nice slow-motion pop-offs shot from several angles, a Higgins trademark). In a second scene later in the film, Fagan stretches out on the picnic table as Ashfield takes it to the next level [anal intercourse].
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Ashfield prepares Fagan for chapter 2 of “Try it, you’ll like it” (and he does, a lot)
Ashfield and Fagan’s chemistry (complete with semi-realistic dialogue, at least by Pornland standards, that they actually seem to have fun with) makes their pairing the high point of the film.
Ashfield (blonder, twinkier, sort of goofy-giggly, with a visibly high sex drive) and Fagan (darker, jockier, more reserved) are indeed well paired. On Ashfield, from the Retro Studs site from August 2011:
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One of the biggest porn stars of the 80s was David Ashfield. David never really had the “leading man” role in porn, but still made a huge impact nonetheless. With his slim build and impressive cut cock, David exuded a natural sexuality mixed with a little goofiness, which in my eyes only made him more sexy. He appeared in dozens of films throughout the 80s, including such classic titles as “Pizza Boy, He Delivers”, “Spring Break”, “Below The Belt”, “Delivery Boys”, “Classmates”, and “Getting It”, just to name a few.
Fagan also appeared in dozens of films, from 1985 through the early 2000s.
The full set of scenes:
1 David Ashfield takes Grant Fagan home and comes onto him on a picnic table. They trade blow jobs.
2 Tony Stefano and Brent Woods in a lobby to a bar.
3 David Ashfield takes Grant home again. Grant sucks himself and David fucks him.
4 Tim Barnes and Art Williams in a bed.
5 Steve Henson and Troy Ramsey take turns rimming and fucking each other.
6 Mike Gere, Chad Johnson, and Art Williams are working out and work each other out while Tim Barnes and Joey Hart videotape them from across the street.
The sex is mostly even-handed, sexually democratic: men trade blow jobs and rim jobs and they flip-fuck. In the three-way in scene 6, after two men have have been fucked, the third announces, “I’m the only one who hasn’t had it yet”, so the other two take turns fucking him. Everybody wants to give it, everybody wants to take it.
Notes on the forms of gay porn. Gay porn is naturally episodic, so as to provide both variety in characters and content (and so to satisfy the varied sexual tastes of the viewers) and to provide periodic climactic moments in the story (and so to bring viewers to ejaculation along with the characters). A movie can be organized as a set of largely unrelated shorts (the counterpart to a collection of short stories) or can be loosely held together by a narrative theme (compare the Canterbury Tales or Arabian Nights); the episodes mostly involve stock characters in stock situations:
coming of age (the first time); the ritual test (gang scenes); same-sex bonding; the quest through dangerous territory; the scenic tour (the road story); the voyage of character development (Bildungsroman), the course of true love through trials, etc.
All of these have their counterparts in other genres of literature; you will recognize several from The Magic Flute and The Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as in The Pizza Boy: He Delivers.
Pizza boys in 2017. Skip forward now to the latest Catalina Pizza Boy, #4. Slice of Pie. He Delivers I own and have watched a number of times; Slice of Pie I know about only through the C1R advertising. But that gives me some occasion to talk not about thematic and narrative organization, but about visual organization. Some gay porn is well crafted as film, and most porn comes with carefully composed stills for advertising, which are created separately from the films themselves (the two are often only tangentially related). Compositions from the three scenes in Slice of Pie, with the bodies arranged in ways both visually and emotionally pleasing:
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Scene 1 Rico Romero and Timothy Rivers — Rico takes Timothy’s big dick in the bedroom
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Scene 2 Rego Bello and Alexander Garrett — watch these thick latin hunks in the locker room
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Scene 3 Xavier Huxx and Dylan Drive — when the cute pizza boy arrives, he’s bringing more than just dinner
(These scenes, all oral, have been cropped to move the focus from cocks to the alignments of the men’s bodies.)
Another gay pizza monument. Moving now from California-inflected Catalina to Joe Gage’s world of working-class mansex (both Higgins and Gage have been subjects of previous postings on this blog), we come to TitanMen’s Campus Pizza (2007), with Dean Flynn, Andrew Justice, Kai Grant, Justin Riddick, David Korben, Jason Reynolds, Damien Crosse, and Mason Wyler. From the TitanMen site:
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On the front cover, front to back: Flynn, Crosse, Justice
TitanMen exclusive Dean Flynn is the Campus Pizza delivery man bringing a steaming slice of sex door-to-door in the latest sexual epic from the dirty mind of Joe Gage.
[1] The first delivery is to Andrew Justice, the cigar-chomping campus custodian who likes to bench press in his garage in the nude. When his nephew Jason Reynolds drops by, he can’t keep his eyes off his uncle’s long cock, which is bouncing up and down with each rep. In no time, the young stud’s stuffing it into his hungry mouth and eager ass.
[2] Tyler Kane, the school’s architecture professor, is burning the midnight oil with Kai Grant, a wheelchair bound grad student. To show his Prof that his cock works just fine, he pulls it out — rock-hard — and peels back the foreskin to give him a taste. Tyler services Kai and then pins his legs back to give him a proper ass drilling with a butt plug and then his cock — fucking the cum right out of him.
[3] For his final delivery of the night, Dean brings a couple of pizzas to four buddies playing poker [the male bonding theme]: TitanMen exclusive Damien Crosse, nubile Mason Wyler [a target for gang scenes], muscular Justin Riddick, and rugged David Korben. They start a game of strip poker for Dean, but the game quickly devolves into a circle jerk as all five guys lose their clothes and can’t hide their raging boners. After they trade BJ’s and blow their wads, Damien and Justin take turns fucking the hell out of Mason, Dean and David.
Flynn and Crosse have been subjects of several previous postings — they are favorites of mine — but Andrew Justice is new to this blog. Publicity shot for the movie, with a broadly smiling cock-teasing Justice:
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From a SINema review quoted on the Joe Gage site:
A handsome delivery youth driving a car through dark streets informs us, “Ohio is the pizza capitol of the world,” thus beginning yet another moody exploration of mid-American maleness written and directed by the great Joe Gage. This time he goes a social step up from the truck-drivers and policeman he’s often concentrated on, and hits a college campus. But it’s still nitty-gritty Joe Gage land. He’s our grim poet of the prick, gay porn’s D.W. Griffith or John Ford, and he’s still going. Amazing! Three scenes are long and leisurely, filled with psychological and physical detail. There’s a duo involving a teacher with student in a wheelchair, and a post-poker five-way mixing the deliverer with two students, the landlord, and even “the handyman.” Sordid, huh?
Sordid, but then we love sordid. Especially in northern, Rust-Belt industrial Ohio, which also teems with colleges and universities, both public (Ohio Northern, Univ. of Toledo, Cleveland State, Kent State, Bowling Green State, Univ. of Akron, Youngstown State) and private (Case Western Reserve, Cleveland Institute of Art, John Carroll, Oberlin, and more).
Beyond Higgins and Gage. The amount of pizza-based porn (straight as well as gay) is mind-blogging. Five more gay examples, including ethnically / racially targeted flicks, some international (some images cropped or fuzzed over for modesty):
(#10) Pizza Boy Gangbang (Jet Set Media)
(#11) First in a Pizza Delivery series, starring Asians: spitroasted pizza boy
(#12) Fresh Hot Pizza Boy (Dragon Media), featuring Latinos
(#13) Black Topped Pizza Boy (set in Brazil)
(#14) Pizza Cazzone (German production, with international cast), wielding Italian cazzone ‘big penis’ (speak any language you want, but carry a big stick)
Gay porn is rich in many kinds of sexual pizza boys, crostini carnali you might call them (English noun crostini: ‘small pieces of toasted or fried bread served with a topping’ (NOAD2); Italian dimin. pl. < Latin crustum ‘pie. cake, bread’). Or, interleaving the two words, carnostalini. Tasty pieces. Slices of hot spicy pie.Whatever.
What is it about pizza boys? Four things about the carnostalini:
1 They are young, sexually desirable men
2 They deliver things – like prostitutes on an outcall, they come to your place, bearing desirable goods for money
3 pizza is an American cultural embodiment of informal social associations — the American food, cutting across many social lines, suitable for solitary pleasure or one-on-one occasions, but especially group gatherings
4 They plug into general associations of food and sex, but more specifically:
(a) The pizza slice is a phallic symbol: it’s a pointed thing that you put it in your mouth and eat
(b) The whole pizza, like a whole pie (sweet or savory, fruit pie or meat pie) is a sexcavital symbol (vagina or anus considered as sexual organ), round and warm and penetrable
(c) More generally, a pizza is a metonym for the whole body (take, eat, this is my body, offered for you)
To elaborate…
Note 1, on the desirability of youths, especialy carnostalini. From Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity by John Mercer (2017):
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Note 2, on delivery men. Of all types, staple figures in porn, straight as well as gay. They deliver food. Packages. Whatever you need. So long as you pay.
Note 3, on pizza slices as phallic symbols. Let me recommend to you Daveo Falaveo’s calculatedly outrageous “Gay Pizza Song”:
(#16) Watch him perform the song here
Single slice of pizza
I’m all on my own.
Sittin here on my bed
waitin by the telephone.I know that you want to….
eat me everyday.
Just because I’m in your mouth
it doesn’t mean you’re gay.
In 2010 Falaveo was in London and posted this:
My goal is to make a healthy living from modeling. I want to use this [Model Mayhem] site to help me get exposed to the industry. I like all styles of modeling. I am a very eccentric, friendly, and outgoing person. I am eccentric with the way I live, eat, and my daily routines.
And his videos.
Note 4, an assortment of relevant entries from GDoS, with some comments:
noun pie in sexual senses: (a) the vagina. [first cite 1533, British citations through 1694; then a gap until US cites start in 1931, from an Ozark folk source; then more generally, i.e. in Jagger & Richard 1973 “Coming Down Again”: “Slip my tongue in someone else’s pie”] (b) a woman. [cites from 16th – 18th centuries] (c) a term of affection. [Norman Mailer, “Tell me why, pie”] (d) (US campus) an attractive, sexually desirable woman; also used derog. [cites from 1955 on]
(And then by the woman > gay man route, though not in GDoS: (a) ‘male anus considered as a sexual organ’ — the sexcavital move. There are probably also occurrences of (b) ‘gay man, considered as a sex object’, though I haven’t found cites.)
GDoS noun piece: 1 as an individual. (a) a woman, esp. when appraised sexually (i.e. a ‘piece of meat’) [first cite 1538] (b) a man [first cite 1797] (c) (gay) a man, in a sexual context. [first cite 1958] … 3 as a lit. or fig. weapon or tool. (a) a gun [standard for centuries, then slang from mid-19th century on] (b) (also fowling piece) the penis.[first cite 1836] … 7 an act of sexual intercourse [first cite c.1920 “She herself had met me for a quick piece on the grass”]
GDoS noun piece of meat: 1 (also hunk of meat, piece of pie-meat) anyone regarded as no more than a physical object, esp. in a sexual context [first cite c.1619] 2 (US gay) a penis. [first cite c.1925]
GDoS noun piece of ass [with many variants]: 1 a woman, not necessarily derog. but invariably from a sexual point of view and usu. dismissive; occas. a man. [first cite 1918] 2 heterosexual sexual intercourse. [first cite c.1930] 3 heter- or homosexual anal intercourse [first cite 1934] 4 (US Underworld) a passive male homosexual [1950 dictionary cites]
Or, of course, sexcavity (vagina or male anus, considered as sexual objects), though GDoS seems to have no cites for these senses.
In any case, if the pizza boy turns up at your door with a hot pie, he might be offering you a lot more than just a friendly nosh.
(By the way, the tale of David Ashfield and Grant Fagan in the Higgins Pizza Boy, scenes 1 and 3, turns sweetly into a love story. Sexual initiation of Fagan, in two stages — and then comes love. To turn a formula around: to Ashfield, Fagan’s not just a piece of meat, he’s a wonderful human being.)
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