Boots Is a Queer Coming-of-Age Story That Marches in Place

At one point in the new series Boots, which not-incidentally has come out on Netflix just in time for National Coming Out Day, two closeted Marine recruits trudge through the wilderness and kiki over just how gay boot camp is. Their shirts are called “blouses,” they’re frequently ordered to “mount,” they shower together, like, 500 times a day. And, of course, there’s the dicks. So, so many dicks. It’s an amusing, if juvenile, observation. But, critically, it’s also a maladaptive fantasy—a tongue-in-cheek aesthetic interpretation of a definitively political machine. The year is 1990, four years before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would become military protocol and still decades before it’d be repealed. These two aimless young men, bonded together by their shared queer identities, are slyly trying to wring some agency back from an institution whose sole purpose is to stomp out its recruits’ identities. In this place, you either hold onto the “weak” person you were before you enlisted, or you nut up and kill him to become someone else.

This is the conundrum at the heel of Boots. Adapted from Greg Cope White’s memoir The Pink Marine, the series follows recent high school graduate Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer) and his diverse array of fellow recruits in a grueling South Carolina Marines’ boot camp, all in search of a new life purpose, all running from a past life trauma. It’s created by Andy Parker, who helmed the similarly dramedic Tales of the City series based on the Armistead Maupin novels about queer life in San Francisco, and executive-produced by the late great Norman Lear, the TV legend behind hundreds of sitcoms from All in the Family to The Jeffersons. Both men’s stylistic tendencies and humanistic worldviews suffuse Boots with the warm glow of what we once deemed “prestige TV,” resulting in a competently made and occasionally moving season of dramatic television. But when the ideological implications of its premise start to enter the ring, Boots has a nasty habit of pulling its punches. At a fraught moment in American history, with LGBTQ rights under newfound siege and our military forces being weaponized against civilians both overseas and domestic, one has to ask: why release Boots now? Who is this show for?

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To put a pin in that grenade for a moment: the first episode kicks off with Cameron, underweight and overanxious, trying to explain to a recruitment officer why he wants to be one of the few, the proud, the Marines. It’s not exactly because of a valiant desire to protect his country. “My life needs a change, sir,” he says. “I want to be somebody else.” Who he wants to become is clear: someone who has self-respect, can fight off the bullies giving him swirlies at school, and is “more masculine,” as his derelict mother Barbara (Vera Farmiga) advises him to be. So, when his straight best friend Ray (Liam Oh) suggests he join him in enlisting despite it being illegal to be gay in the military, Cameron weighs his options —he has no money for college, and life in Bismarck with his callous family doesn’t inspire him much either—and decides to tag along, wooed by the brochure’s evocation of summer camp. Once there, Cameron seems to be the only one surprised that the vibes are most certainly not those of summer camp.

Cameron quickly realizes what a mistake he’s made. Between the homophobic jerks he’s forced to bunk with and his drill instructors’ loud penchant for body-shaming that not even Pete Hesgeth could compete with, it’s all initially even worse than the life he left behind. However, over the course of the season, Cameron starts to understand that, now a part of a band of brothers, his decisions no longer solely affect him, and he begins to toughen up, both in spite of and thanks to Sgt. Bobby Sullivan’s (Max Parker) special, suspiciously motivated interest in molding the effete young Wilson Phillips fan into something resembling a “real” man.

The show’s pithy title (“boots” as in boot camp, as metonym for the military itself, and as intensifier in queer ballroom slang—“boots the house down”) is quasi-funny in the way the rest of the show is quasi-funny; expect a few chuckles but no guffaws. But even though we take detours into the motivations and inner journeys of the other recruits and instructors (Boots could reasonably be deemed an ensemble piece), Cameron and Sgt. Sullivan’s interior battles prove the most philosophically and emotionally rich. While I won’t spoil exactly what Sullivan’s dealing with, suffice it to say that the decorated soldier’s icy exterior and preoccupation with “killing” the “enemy inside of you” promises Cameron a model of the type of man he could become, for better or worse. All he has to do is suppress his inner Cameron, literalized by a sarcastic, swishier Cameron that appears intermittently to both hype him up and neg him—think Smeagol vs. Gollum but twinkier.

This is where the show’s messaging gets hairy. (Mild spoilers ahead.) Boots is aesthetically conservative, liberally minded, and inwardly focused. Identity politics act as the show’s vanguard, and, commendably, Boots doesn’t shy away from depicting how racism, homophobia, and sexism fester within the armed forces. But often these obstacles are portrayed as just that: unfortunate yet inevitable hurdles one must overcome to achieve self-actualization in the form of an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor insignia pinned to his lapel.

It’s the quandary endemic to much politically oriented TV, but made manifest in Boots. Narrative-driven television tends to be an inherently humanistic medium, one in which we understand character transformation and plot advancement to be governed by the rule of individual choice rather than the invisible hand of structural machinations. Irony can help shed light on this trick of the trade, but Boots’ standard operating procedure is sincerity. Characters with no interest in taking a human life are consistently manipulated against de-enlisting; a recruit’s tragic death is ruled his own fault for not disclosing a medical condition, rather than the fault of the draconian disciplinary regimen that leads to his collapse, and his death is then used as a lesson for the other recruits. Even back home, when Barbara rightfully rails against the recruitment officer who viewed her son as merely a number in a quota he had to fill, she later drops her crusade once he charms her into bed. None of these instances is presented diegetically as anything other than a necessary, even occasionally virtuous, dramatic beat meant to signal character development, rather than what could reasonably be considered grim examples of the military’s tried-and-true methodology for subduing subordination on all fronts.

So, as this process to homogenize the homo out of Cameron continues, the results are left not necessarily ambiguous but surprisingly even-handed. Cameron learns to stand up for himself against adversaries, but it’s also shown that what makes him a successful Marine is the personality traits with which he arrived at boot camp: loyalty to his friends, an inclination toward empathy, and a strong sense of honesty. When an opportunity to leave the corps scot free arrives toward the end of the season, Cameron is given a choice. The old Cameron wouldn’t have hesitated to get out of there, but the new Cameron is torn. It can be argued that his eventual decision is born from the newfound sense of self he’s gained; it can also be argued that it’s from the sense of self that’s been destroyed. The show asks whether Cameron is better off changing himself to fit the Marines’ bill or if the Marines themselves need to change their definition of the bill. The real question is why the Marines appeal to directionless people like Cameron in the first place, and why we accept a program designed to turn these young men into killing machines as a viable solution at all.

It’s this uneasy negotiation between celebrating queer resilience and sidestepping the military’s larger role in perpetuating harm—both within its ranks and across the globe—that keeps Boots stuck in the mud. The show doesn’t risk falling out of line by taking a stance beyond its humanist ethos, even when now more than ever we could use entertainment that challenges its audiences to think beyond the story depicted on screen. It’s only at the end of the season, when those who’ve completed the rigorous thirteen weeks of boot camp celebrate at a bar, that a TV hanging over the liquor shelves plays a breaking news update: President George H.W. Bush has declared that U.S. troops will be deployed into Saudi Arabia in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The reality dawns on the new Marines’ faces. We know the characters we’ve just watched for eight episodes are the types of young men who will be sent to kill thousands over the next several decades. Or will they die themselves—as protectors of the free world, or pawns of the United States’ imperial ambitions? We’ll have to wait for season two to find out. Or, we can simply look at history.

Boots premieres October 9 on Netflix.

Michael Savio is a freelance critic and former editorial intern at Paste.