“Becoming a man? What does that actually mean?” That’s the question posed at the start of Boots, Netflix’s new queer coming-of-age series set in a Marine Corps training program, but also one essentially posed by our new so-called Secretary of War Pete Hegseth just last week. Yet while Hegseth, onstage before the nation’s top military brass, tried to answer the question with chest-beating machismo, insisting on “the highest male standard” and decrying “beardos” and “males who think they’re females,” only Boots arrives at a coherent answer.
In an incredible bit of timing, Boots is also set in 1990—the year to which Hegseth said he wants to wind back military training and standards, declaring current guidelines “woke garbage.” The series, which began streaming on Thursday, follows Miles Heizer (the 31-year-old star of 13 Reasons Why and Love, Simon) as Cameron Cope, a gay teenager who seems lost upon graduating high school. This is thanks in no small part to his flighty mother Barbara (Vera Farmiga), who has moved the family 12 times in the past decade, but it’s also because all he really seems to know about himself is that he’s a Cancer sun with Aries rising who loves Wilson Phillips. Cameron is out to Ray (Liam Oh), his straight best (and only) friend, so following Ray into the Marines seems like the one clear path that’s presented to him—even if, as he quickly learns, this is no summer camp. “My life needs a change, sir,” he tells the recruiting officer. “I want to be somebody else.”
Yet what Boots is refreshingly insistent on throughout its eight episodes is that Cameron never feels he needs to work out how to be straight, even in a pre–Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military—rather, he just needs to work out who he is in general. Soldiering through boot camp may seem like a stodgily obvious place for a boy to learn how to become a man, but Boots makes clear that no amount of shouting from a drill instructor can teach such a thing. Instead, real manhood is realized in quieter moments of compassion, even fragility—something that Cameron can evince to the rest of his squadron as much as they can to him. The show’s most teachable moments of confident masculinity, then, arise in unexpected scenes: Cameron helping a friend use the bathroom when the friend can’t do so alone because of a hazing ritual, one sympathetic recruit assuring another that crying is normal, or a burly sergeant imitating Cookie Monster’s voice for his young son, then later tenderly cradling his newborn daughter. What Boots understands, and what Hegseth never will, is that what makes a real man—even a Marine—is not braggadocio or testosterone. “A man is someone who carries the weight that’s put in his pack even if it’s heavy—even if it’s a pack he doesn’t want to carry. He carries it because that’s the sacrifice the man makes,” one young recruit eventually observes. “And now I understand: He does it out of love.”
To make it to screens, Boots, based on Greg Cope White’s 2016 memoir The Pink Marine, itself had to go through something of a military obstacle course. The show was originally greenlit in May 2023 under the working title The Corps (Boots is a much better name, not least because it’s a play on drag slang), but production was shut down for over a year just one week into filming because of the Hollywood writers strike. Then producer Norman Lear died months later, making Boots the TV icon’s last production. When filming finally wrapped in August 2024, it was just three months before Donald Trump’s reelection would usher in an anti-woke crusade targeting all aspects of government, including the military, prompting some to speculate that the series was being slow-walked to release because of its subject matter. Indeed, there is plenty to make Hegseth and his ilk unhappy, including capable women recruits and a Latina company commander (played by Ana Ayora), as well as scenes of gay sex and gay love.
Boots is just the latest in a long line of shows and movies exploring life in military training academies, one that stretches at least as far back as 1957’s The D.I., which was set at the same Marine Corps training center on Parris Island, South Carolina. The stories tend to follow the same basic structure: An underdog—whether it’s Goldie Hawn, Bill Murray, Pauly Shore, Demi Moore, Hilary Duff, or Lisa Simpson—finds themself enduring grueling drills, various forms of abuse, and craterous expectations before being transformed. “Didn’t you watch Full Metal Jacket like I said?” Ray asks Cameron on their first night, when the latter is surprised that boot camp is more than just mud and bugbites. “I was going to, but then there was a Golden Girls marathon on,” Cameron responds. “I know—I’m such a Rose.”
On paper, Boots also has much in common with Overcompensating, the Amazon Prime Video comedy from this year in which Benito Skinner plays a closeted football jock navigating college. Yet I found the experience of spending hours with the Boots recruits far more enjoyable than the painfully fratty bros of Overcompensating, even if both shows all too effectively build a world of casual homophobia. (“Snuggle up, butter butts!” one drill instructor tells the recruits at bedtime, in a turn of phrase that I, as a gay man, had no choice but to instantly adopt.) That’s in no small part because Heizer is well cast as the lead, delivering a metamorphosis that feels both earnest and earned. But it’s also because the supporting characters in Boots aren’t one-dimensional, either. We see how, for example, Ray’s ex-Marine father withheld affection from his son as a means of child-rearing, and how another father of a set of twin recruits (Blake Burt and Brandon Tyler Moore) turned brother against brother because of one’s weight gain. Max Parker is also especially strong as Sgt. Sullivan, a no-nonsense instructor with a tormented past who takes a special interest in Cameron.
None of which is to say that Boots is perfect. It can be uneven in tone—sometimes twee, sometimes sober—and is occasionally too reliant on unnecessary voice-overs and hallucinations in which Cameron talks to versions of himself for lazy exposition purposes. Farmiga is also mostly sidelined in scenes that feel, perhaps inescapably, disconnected and give the Oscar nominee little to do, save for one late moment in which she reflects on her parenting.
But it’s in that crucial scene that Boots most clearly confronts its central question: How are we preparing our sons for the world? What values are we imparting to them? Masculinity, like trauma, isn’t something you’re born with, but something that’s taught and learned. But so too is empathy, and the idea that kindness is a strength, not a weakness. Such an idea should hardly be worth repeating, but in Pete Hegseth’s America, it’s all too clear that it needs to be.
