Will Adam Sandler's New Comedy Help the Gay Medicine Go Down?

The idea behind this scenario is that it makes it easier for viewers who are not gay (or female or black or Jewish) to have a first-hand feeling of what it's like to have that sort of crap flung at you -- particularly if those viewers have ever done the flinging. This brings us to the second method:

Do I look that awful when I say [insert bigoted epithet here]?

Adam Sandler's character in Chuck and Larry undergoes something of a journey over the course of the film. At the beginning of the story, he's goofing on Larry's effeminate, show tune-loving son; by the end, and this is something of a minor spoiler, he is – no joke – looking right at the camera and telling people not to use the word “faggot” anymore. (Oddly enough, Sandler already participated in a cinematic attempt to neutralize that particular F-word in Reign Over Me earlier this year, when his character equated its use as a jovial epithet between straight men as meaningless, the equivalent of the word “poundcake.” Go figure.)

Again, the filmmakers want to allow those viewers who might not already be enlightened in their views on gay people to have a character they can follow and, one would hope, learn alongside.

Perhaps the classic example of this kind of character happens in another movie about gay issues, the Oscar-winning drama Philadelphia (1993). Denzel Washington plays a homophobic lawyer who winds up taking the case of his former rival, Tom Hanks' openly gay attorney, now suing his prestigious law firm over HIV discrimination. Who doesn't identify with Denzel Washington, after all? So how could you not be won over to loving Hanks' character – and, by association, gay men everywhere – when Denzel does it?

The other tack on presenting bigotry, of course, is to make the bigots so slimy that no audience member in his or her right mind would want to identify with them. So you have the moronic railroad bosses and uptight close-minded townsfolk spouting the N-word in Mel Brooks' classic comedy Blazing Saddles (1974) and Dabney Coleman's “sexist, egotistical, lying hypocritical bigot” nightmare of a boss in Nine to Five (1980). It's a less subtle approach, perhaps, but it still works. And suffice it to say that none of Chuck and Larry's homophobes get to be nearly as charismatic as our heroes.

I think I've learned something today

This one's a subtle variant on #2, but it's effective in a different way on an entirely different segment of the audience. This one's for the fence-sitters, the folks who don't have strong feelings against any particular segment of the population, but who also wonder what all the fuss is about. Call them the “Well, I don't discriminate against anyone myself, so why should I worry about it?” people.

Throughout Chuck and Larry, James is always loving and never overtly intolerant of his aforementioned tap-dancing progeny, although he clearly harbors some small hope that the boy might one day embrace baseball as a way of life. But it's not until James goes through the wringer of homophobia himself that he fully embraces his kid's musical-comedy dreams.

One is reminded of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the once-groundbreaking, now-tame Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). They play intelligent, open-minded people who think of themselves as being progressive when it comes to civil rights, but their fashionable liberality gets put to the test when their daughter comes home to tell them that she's marrying a doctor, played by Sidney Poitier. (As critics of the time pointed out, it kind of stacks the deck when you're not just marrying any old suitor, but a doctor played by Sidney Poitier. Even legendary bigots like George Wallace and Lester Maddox would have had a hard time raising objections to such a stellar son-in-law.)

For audiences, of course, Hepburn and Tracy represented – even in the tumultuous late 1960s – a voice of reason, an onscreen glimpse of American spunk and wit and love and brains at their best. As beloved screen stars of an earlier era, they were safe, white permission to accept people of color. By golly, if those two could embrace an upstanding black doctor then so, by extension, could the audience.

That is the role Sandler and James perform here. If these two guys' guys are able to see gay folks as just folks who deserve the same rights as everyone else, then just maybe the hordes of twenty-something straight boys who flock to Sandler's movies might be able to do the same.

It's impossible to know how much influence these movies actually have in propelling social issues forward. Are they harbingers of changes about to come? Reflective of where society is at in any given moment? Or are they actually behind the curve and playing it safe? No doubt it's different for every movie and every era's issues, but they have a part to play, and anyone following the struggle for gay rights would be hard-pressed not to argue that gay marriage's time has come.

Chuck and Larry, alas, isn't a particularly funny movie. But if it has the power to move the national debate about gay rights and marriage and visibility just an inch or two in the right direction, then I will delight in its having been made. Especially if I never, ever have to see it again.

Duralde is the author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men. Find him at www.alonsoduralde.com.