In a pinch I could maybe, possibly have sex with a warm, oven-heated apple pie (or a pumpkin or pecan pie), but never, ever would I get down with a piece of mushy fruit. Because of the possibility of stinging pain caused by citrusy, acidic juices…hello?

For some reason this doesn’t stop Elio, a 17 year-old twink type from a wealthy Italian family, in Andre Aciman‘s “Call Me By Your Name“, a 2007 gay romance novel that is well respected by critics and celebrated in gay circles. And so Elio fucks a cut-open peach. Moreover, after Elio is “finished” with it, he gives the peach to Oliver, his object of off-and-on romantic obsession, and Oliver wolfs it down, slurpy juices and all. Or something like that.

Call Me By Your Name costars Armie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet.

Armie Hammer, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino.

This is one reason, at least, why Luca Guadagnino‘s film adaptation of Aciman’s book, which costars Armie Hammer as Oliver and Timothee Chalamet as Elio, is currently a hot topic of conversation.

Call Me By Your Name will premiere a little more than two weeks hence at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

The film is said to be Brokeback Mountain-ish — sexually frank but at the same time a refined, emotionally affecting period drama set in Italy. Maybe a little Luchino Visconti-ish, maybe a touch of Pier Paolo Pasolini…who knows? The screenplay is coauthored by Guadagnino (who directed last year’s A Bigger Splash and who also has a remake of Suspiria in the pipeline), James Ivory and Walter Fasano.

Today’s big news, reported by Variety‘s Ramin Satoodeh, is that Call Me By Your Name has been acquired by Sony Pictures Classics.

The peach scene is said to be a gay equivalent of either the butter scene in Last Tango in Paris or the eating scene in Tom Jones, or maybe a combination of the two. This, at least, is what the comment boards seem to believe.

Anonymous Goodreads comment: “I enjoyed the book, but as I recall it, the story is not exactly a ‘romance.’ Two horny guys essentially have convenience sex. When they meet again, years later, one of them warns the other that he is not gay, so there isn’t going to be any replay of their previous intimacy. I suppose the screenplay could take liberties with this story line, sex things up, and provide a different (more upbeat) ending. But a film faithful to the book, if skillfully handled, might be an interestingly offbeat gay movie, avoiding some of the usual clichés.”