With less reporters on her hands inside the Pentagon, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson expressed her disdain for Netflix’s gay military series “Boots.”
The Pentagon press secretary said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly, published Thursday, that the series, which has performed on the streamer’s viewership charts since its release last week, is an attempt to push Netflix’s “ideological agenda” of the military.
“Under President Trump and Secretary [Pete] Hegseth, the U.S. military is getting back to restoring the warrior ethos,” Wilson said. “Our standards across the board are elite, uniform, and sex neutral because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn’t care if you’re a man, a woman, gay, or straight.”
The Netflix series follows a closeted gay teenager Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer) as he and his best friend Ray McAffey (Liam Oh) join the Marines. The show follows the friends through training camp in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era.
Wilson continued that the standards of the U.S. military will continue to be upheld to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump’s standards, despite the retelling in the Netflix series.
“We will not compromise our standards to satisfy an ideological agenda, unlike Netflix whose leadership consistently produces and feeds woke garbage to their audience and children,” Wilson said.
A rep for Netflix did not respond to TheWrap’s requests for comment.
Hegseth has drawn criticism for his anti-LGBTQ+ actions taken against the U.S. military. His team has scrubbed the name of gay rights activists from Navy ships and attempted to remove transgender military service members from their posts.
Hegseth has stood staunchly against “woke” culture and vowed to end it in the armed forces, opposing directives for “gender-neutral” fitness standards and the use of pronouns.
“Boots” was created by Andy Parker and was based on retired Marine Corps. Sgt. Greg Cope White’s memoir “The Pink Marine.” The series was produced by WWII veteran Norman Lear. All eight episodes are available to stream on Netflix.
In an interview with TheWrap ahead of its premiere, Parker said he did not feel like the series was inherently political. He hoped the show would be able to shine a lot on the personal cost it takes for any person to serve in the military and how it is enhanced as a gay person.
“By its nature, it really gets into the guts of what it feels like for people to have to face that kind of discrimination and that kind of fear, and to watch what that does to people, emotionally and psychologically,” he told TheWrap. “It’s not good for this institution to eat its own in this way, people who have chosen to serve and to do it honorably. I hope the show shines a human light on that. I hope people come away with a greater sense of empathy about that.”
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