[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for Boots.]
The title of the first episode of Netflix’s Boots, all about a closeted young man who joins the Marines with his best friend, is “The Pink Marine.” It’s a nod to the source material for this military drama, whose own subtitle hints at precisely what this Miles Heizer-starring show is concerned with. Greg Cope White’s memoir, The Pink Marine: One Boy’s Journey Through Boot Camp To Manhood, squarely anchors its narrative on that titular path. For Cope White (and Heizer’s fictional Cameron Cope), the Marines embodied and in turn offered access to a socially sanctioned vision of masculinity. As Boots captures, the very concept of a “pink Marine” like Greg/Cameron puts into relief the cracks inherent in thinking of masculinity as intrinsically rigid.
“I entered boot camp in 1979—fifteen years before ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was put into law—feeling less masculine than everyone else and burdened by the secret of being gay.” So writes Cope White in the author’s note to his 2015 memoir. Just like Cameron in the show, Cope White joined the Marines as a way of better adhering to society’s ideal of an “American man.” In an interview with The A.V. Club, Cope White explains, “I was looking for my place in the masculine world. If society, my friends, the bullies, were all telling me that I wasn’t manly enough, but I had all the characteristics, then where was my place in the masculine world?”
“Now, granted, the Marine Corps might be a severe place to find that out,” he adds. But at the time, it did feel like a logical arena to find himself and better understand his place in the world. Which is exactly how we first encounter Cameron (Heizer) in Boots before he enlists. In Andy Parker’s adaptation of Cope White’s memoir, we initially meet a mop-haired boy who’s asphyxiated by his life at home and eager to spend what he feels will be a summer camp of sorts with his best friend. But soon, Cope finds himself having all his insecurities aired out—many of which are presented as failures in the eyes of the Marines. He’s too skinny. He’s too unathletic. He’s too sentimental. He’s too caring. He’s too unfocused. And yes, for much of his time at boot camp, that also boils down to that kind of colorful description memoir and episode title speak to: He is too “pink.” Or, as one of his DIs more pointedly puts it early in the show: “If there are no faggots in my Marine Corps, why are you still here?”
Cope being gay is coded as being antithetical to being a Marine. What he must learn during boot camp isn’t just how to keep his secret in check (which turns out to be both easier and harder than he’d first imagined). He has to learn how to become a man. The show, which is set in 1990, puts itquite simply: “Boot camp is the machine that makes men.” But what initially appears to be a rather obvious kind of arithmetic (Marines are men and men are not homosexual, therefore homosexuals cannot be Marines) is constantly subverted and complicated. Boots insists time and time again that such equations do not and cannot tell the whole story. At a time when concepts like “toxic masculinity” and “crises of masculinity” feel already dated if not outright irrelevant (or just devoid of meaning altogether), Boots offers a surprisingly complex vision of Marine masculinity that makes room for its ruthlessness in the abstract yet also finds space for a kind of tender camaraderie that undergirds it in practice.
“It’s a machine, right?” Parker asks himself almost rhetorically when talking with The A.V. Club about the show’s grappling with thorny issues around masculinity. “And that machine is going to turn you into a man. And so there’s all the textbook things that will make you a man or a good Marine: strength and endurance and a sort of stoicism.”
Indeed, every episode of Boots follows a different test—from swimming and holding one’s breath to obstacle courses and hand-to-hand combat. And Cope, who initially seems doomed to fail spectacularly, soon ends up finding his groove, quieting his inner voice to embrace all that the Marines are there to offer him. But Boots doesn’t present just one “pink Marine”—nor does it present homosexuality as the only source of friction within boot camp’s “masculine” ideals. There are recruits who struggle because of their weight, those whose race make them targets of cruel mockery, and others still whose own mental-health issues risk derailing their dream of being a Marine altogether. Cope is not alone in feeling there are parts of himself he needs to disown if he is to be accepted into this so-called manly brotherhood.
More tellingly, though, is the way Cope isn’t framed as the singular archetype for what a gay Marine can be. Intertwined with his story are those of other Marines and would-be-Marines that capture alternate paths for the young closeted gay man. The most obvious one is Sergeant Robert Sullivan (Max Parker), whose story is unpacked as the season unfolds. A closeted young man not unlike Cope himself, Sullivan retreated back to training recruits after a fling with another guy while stationed abroad put his very service in jeopardy. Refusing to let anything sully his reputation (and destroying his lover’s career, in the process), he’s hardened himself into a fist of a man. But such a sense of self has corroded him from within. By the time he’s fleeing a possible arrest (for battery), it’s clear the lessons he had internalized about how angerand strength are requirements if one is to be a good Marine (a man, really) have become unsustainable. It’s no surprise to find fellow “pink” recruit Jones (Jack Cameron Kay) wanting to leave the Marines altogether, refusing to sacrifice his truth for an institution that may not accept him fully.
Where Sullivan buries his former self, Jones merely deigns to play such a part. All that macho warrior stuff, he tells Cope, is just a performance, one he’s learned how to dial in and up when needed. The more the two look at Sullivan, the clearer it is he’s lost sight of how much of his posturing was just that. Now he’s just a hollowed out man who’s not who he is nor who he always wanted to be. Neither path, of course, feels remarkably sustainable for Cope, but both Sullivan and Jones each make allowances for what the Marines can offer them and what they in turn can get from such an institution. And what all three of them understand is that the Marines can teach them how to be (or become) a man—a better one, even.
“Boys grab how it should be,” one recruit intones withpride. “Men deal with what is.” At times,such invectives feel reductive and almost laughable. These are all boys playing at being rather than becoming men, it seems. And yet that’s central to the promise the Marine offers these young men. “A man is someone who carries the weight that’s put in his pack,” another states, “even if it’s heavy. Even if it’s a pack he doesn’t wanna carry, he carries it because that’s the sacrifice a man makes. And now I understand. He does it out of love.”
That lesson would seem to be the same as the boys vs. men distinction. But, in fact, there’s nuance there—especially with that call toward love. It’s but one of the many instances where Boots refuses any tidy understanding of such sterile ideas about “manhood.” There’s strength but there’s also love. There’s determination but also sacrifice. When Ochoa, the recruit who voices those very words later collapses and dies while screaming the very tenets of Marine life that had been instilled in him (“Justice! Judgment! Integrity! Discipline!” he yells in agony), his demise rocks Cope and everyone else at boot camp. Ochoa’s death marks a shift in Boots. It’s the moment the drill instructors in charge have to reassess the ways they’re training these young men. And while there’s still plenty of screaming and valorizing a kind of cruel vision of violence, you see these DIs also making room for grief and grace, for respite and relief.
There are hugs and there’s encouragement. There are tears and there are helpful words of wisdom. There may well be a push toward capital S strength, but also a sense that the Marines cannot wholly be dispassionate men all around. “That’s just letting people see that ‘masculinity’ runs the gamut of emotions,” Cope White, who was part of the writing room for Boots, explains. “And yes, I want people to understand that, yes, there are those angry young men, but there’s also a tender side as well.”
In a moment when the “angry young man”as a figure and as a reality continues to feel like an ever-present threat, Boots is an attempt to expand what masculinity can look like and what it can be rooted in. “There’s a story that young men are being told right now, which is: ‘You’re fucked up because of them. You’re fucked up because of this thing,’” Parker says. “And I think that’s a different message than what the Marine Corps is offering, which I think is actually more constructive. Along with the discipline, there is actually a different message, which is you’ve got to go inside. Not that the Marine Corps is therapy—but I mean that the challenge of going to boot camp and having your guts ripped out and being exposed and being vulnerable and being scared and being put in these positions of danger is revealing.”
Therein lies what’s most incisive about Boots. Cope ends the season becoming a proud Marine (even if one who still needs to hide part of who he is); and he gets there because of his friends, the tenderness some of his fellow recruits showed him, and the kind of grace he’s learned to grant himself. He may feel he’s become a “man,” but the idea of what that looks like is arguably a far cry from what he’d originally thought that would mean. It’s a vision of masculinity that depends on vulnerability, on a softness that begins and ends with empathy. It’s the most refreshing and invigorating part of Boots and clearly central to its message.
“Even in the midst of all of the training which prescribes a certain kind of masculinity,” as Parker explains it, “there’s a reality underneath it, which is that we’re fucking human beings. We don’t really know what we’re doing. We’re figuring it out together. The best way I can do that is to sometimes be vulnerable with you and show you a piece of me—show you something that’s truthful of me and hope and risk that you’re gonna see that, recognize that, support that.”
