If you wanted to make a documentary or even a drama about gay discrimination in contemporary society today – and also hoped to have it open on several thousand screens nationwide, including multiplexes throughout the Bible belt – you'd probably get a lot of studio doors slammed in your face. But when your name is Adam Sandler, and you want to explore those ideas in a wacky farce called I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, the gates are flung wide open.

Despite its many flaws (see our upcoming review this Thursday), Chuck and Larry will probably do more for the national debate on gay marriage than every book written by conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan and every letter you've sent to your senator put together. Red-staters of every stripe who wouldn't watch a Logo documentary on a bet might very well rush out to see this movie, based on the comic appeal of Sandler and co-star Kevin James alone.

But this “bait-and-switch” approach is a tried-and-true one for Hollywood. Like Mary Poppins' spoonful of sugar, a little comedy makes it a whole lot easier for audiences to swallow exposure to concepts that make them otherwise twitchy. There are, in fact, three main methods employed by comedies (and even some dramas) that allow filmmakers to teach audiences a civics lesson about equal rights without being thuddingly didactic about it.

How can they be so mean to that nice [insert name of movie star here]?

In Chuck and Larry, James plays a New York firefighter who – for contrived circumstances the script has to bend over backwards to maintain – asks best friend Sandler to enter into a domestic partnership with him so that James' pension benefits can go to his children and not his dead wife should he die in the line of duty. (Like I said, don't ask.)

Sandler's character has been presented as a cocky ladies' man with a gaggle of Hooter's waitresses running in and out of his bachelor pad, but James saved his life, putting Sandler in his debt, so he goes through with the deception.

When circumstances lead to Sandler and James' public identification as a gay couple, it all starts hitting the fan. Their fellow firefighters are leery about sharing a shower, a fellow dad at James' kids' school tells him he's no longer welcome to help with the Boy Scouts or to coach Little League, and Sandler's buddies don't even want to play pick-up basketball with him anymore because they worry he'll get too handsy.

Because these indignities are happening to a) a beloved movie and TV star who are b) playing guys who aren't even really gay, the audience is allowed to feel indignant on their behalf, more than they would if these horrible things were happening to an actual gay person. But hey, if it takes watching a heterosexual get gay-bashed to make straight audiences identify with the plight of queers everywhere, so be it.

If this methodology seems familiar, it's because you've seen it in lots of movies: Dustin Hoffman gets his derriere pinched while in drag in Tootsie (1982), while C. Thomas Howell gets tossed in the clink for “driving while black” when he impersonates an African-American in Soul Man (1986). The granddaddy of all “innocent” victims of bigotry film would probably be Gregory Peck's portrayal of a Gentile reporter who goes undercover as a Jew in 1947's Gentleman's Agreement.

This approach can be tricky, of course – feminists didn't complain about Hoffman playing a woman, but many people were up in arms over the idea of Howell donning “blackface,” even if it was with the best of intentions. Gay audiences have been similarly leery of Chuck and Larry for its straight-guys-passing-as-queer plot, to say nothing of the fantasyland scenario in which having a same-sex partner becomes more legally beneficial rather than less. Additionally, the film's ridiculous trailer did little to assure viewers that Sandler and James wouldn't just be indulging in one gay-panic joke after another. (The movie's ultimate offenses have more to do with bad writing and directing than with homophobia.)

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.