There is a lot at stake with Netflix’s Boots, a queer coming-of-age drama set in 1990, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of pluck. Amidst a lot of macho attitudes and bravado is Miles Heizer’s Cameron, a closeted high school graduate who signs up for the United States Marine Corps just because he’s bored and has no plans for college. Not only is he physically tested, Cameron is forced to hide his sexuality–this is a few years before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell–he becomes more attuned in how to shield himself from a system designed to tell him that he is too much of a sissy. He’s not strong enough, not man enough. Creator Andy Parker felt a kinship with Boots’ original source material, and he has made a show that proves that bravery isn’t only measured by how physically strong you are.
At the beginning of our talk, I admitted to Parker that Heizer’s Cameron reminded me of someone that I did community theater with. I knew him since he was in high school, and this shy young man joined the Army a few years out of high school. I remember seeing pictures of him on social media after he came back from basic training, his head shaved and his t-shirt noticeably tighter from bulking up. If Cameron looked at the younger version of himself, just from a few weeks earlier, he probably wouldn’t recognize himself.
“Transformation, for me, is what the show is really about,” Parker says. “As a writer, you’re sometimes given the gift of a context that allows you to let the drama unfold in this really organic way. A lot of the times, you’re looking for ways to inject more stakes or looking for how the changes will happen with the characters. Boot camp is the place that is designed to do that. It’s a machine for transformation–we say in the show that the Marines is the machine that makes men. It’s designed to be this place of confrontation and of a place where you have to wrestle with yourself, your weaknesses, your failures in order to be broken and rebuilt. For a dramatist, that’s gold.
Sony had optioned Greg Cope White’s memoir, and I really resonated with it because I had been a closeted kid in high school who flirted with joining the Marines. I had taken the ASVAB, and I had done all the things that you would do to finally sign on that dotted line. A part of me knew that that was just me running from myself and that was not the right reason to go do something so extreme. Even though I didn’t take that path, this was very much the experience of reading the memoir in the sense of the road not taken. That really helped me put myself into this experiene and imagine what it would hae been like to have that confrontation.”
While Parker’s drama does focus on a queer character, he surmises that many people will feel the ability to connect with Cameron’s plight. We all want to feel accepted, we all want to feel that connection with other people.
“I think all young people, and especially gay men, search to find out who they are and have to figure out who they’re going to be,” he says. “It’s a universal experience, to search for purpose. We search for community, acceptance and dignity, and the Marine Corps is offering that to these young men. In 1990, you could make this bargain as a gay man, and to try to get those things and receive those thing, which you desperately want from an organization like the Marines. You have to do this other thing, though, and that’s deny who you are. I was very interested in this trade-off, because there’s something so bittersweet and ironic about the idea that somebody could be given confidence and courage at the cost of denying themselves. That is such a poignant and rich theme to be able to explore, and I hope that is what we’ll continue to dissect in future seasons. Cameron has made this choice. By the end of the season, they’ve become Marines–they’ve earned it. But he’s decided that he’s willing to sacrifice this one thing in order to get these other things.”
Cameron might not believe that he has certain things in commeon with Max Parker’s Sergeant Sullivan, but Boots defies expectations again by drawing parallels between these young men. One is older than the other, but the younger soldier is fresher in his fight to suppress his true identity. Sullivan has had more practice at it. One of the best elements of this season is how Cameron sees a carbon copy of himself devoid of self-doubt and the prying eyes of his peers. Heizer gives that voice a bit of a higher lilt and he is less inhibited. I have dubbed him Cameron’s True Fabulous Self, and it’s something that I cannot wait to see how Boots continues in subsequent seasons. Did Sullivan have that kind of viewpoint as well?
“It was important that we find a way to highlight for Cameron the sort of diverging paths,” Parker says. “With Sullivan and Jones, he has these two models of two very different ways of a queer person in that time confronting the challenge of what it means to stay in the military or not. That he decides that he’s going to make a third way, and the question we should be left with is whether that will succeed. Is he delusional? One of the first things I pitched when I was talking about how to do the show as that if we are going to have a gay kid in 1990 in the Marines, he’s going to have to closet himself. He has to hide. We are going to have to personify that part of him that is sequestered–we have to see it. That inner voice becomes this independent point of view that has his own relationship wI think a lot of queer people have an inner voice that is different from what we are projecting outward. That part of him has its own arc and was a powerful change throughout the season.”
It’s important, though, that Boots doesn’t give up on Sullivan too. Parker doesn’t make him a stock villain, and we feel the blanket of darkness that Sullivan draws over himself, especially when he feels threatened. Could these two men, some day, become friends? It would be easy for a show that analyzes masculinity to abanson Sullivan but it would rather find out where he is coming from and where that anger goes next.
“I was very interested in taking this kid who is in the closet with Cameron and letting it exist alongside this other story of a decorated, experienced Marine,” he explains. “What happens when they collide? Sullivan starts out as Cameron’s tormentor, and then, at a certain point, he becomes his mentor like he instantly realizes that there’s something to shape and mold in his own image. I wanted the audience on the edge of their seats concerned that even though Sullivan ishelping Cameron towards this more confident version of himself that there is this darkness in him that we’re not sure is the right path for Cameron. In terms of Miles’ phsyical transformation, because at the start of the season, there’s no possible way you could look at him and look at Sullivan and think, ‘I could see Cameron looking like Sullivan.’ By the end of episode eight, though, you could see it. If you squint a little. We don’t give up on Sullivan or give him some sort of dismal end, because even in his collapse lies the experience of confronting ourselves and having to come out and dismantle the thing we’ve erected in front of the world.”
How would Cameron fare if his best friend, Liam Oh’s Ray, would’ve abandoned him at boot camp? The connection between these two friends is one of the reasons why we feel so secure. When Cameron is facing the camera, it feels like we can feel Ray’s eyes boring into the back of his head just to make sure his friend is okay. At the end of the season, Cameron tells Ray that he doesn’t need him in the same way anymore, and Oh’s chin quivers in a mixture of heartbreak and pride. That element from White’s memoir was a foundational point that Parker needed to keep.
“I was very clear from the start that we weren’t telling a direct story of Greg Cope White,” he says. “We were going to have the freedom to do our own thing, but one of the things that was most impactful to me was the real relationship between Greg and his straight friend, Dale. I wanted to take elements of that and make sure that was ioncluded this season, and we so often when we see a gay-straight friendship, usually one is pining for the other. Or it’s kids secretly in love, but I am so sick of that trope. Cameron and Ray just truly get each other and they are entirely comfortable with each other. Yet there is a power dynamic at the start that ties in with boot camp but with a different set of expectations. It recalibrates that dynamic and resets it over and over again. By the end of the season, they are different people and they are different people to each other while their affection for each other has persisted. Greg and Dale are still best friends 50 years later.”
Boots dropped at the beginning of October, only a few days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told hundreds of generals that he wanted to rid the military of “woke garbage.” There shouldn’t be a “right way or wrong way” to be a man, and masculinity shouldn’t fit into one, singular mold. If you are willing, able, and healthy to serve our country, it should be your right to do so, and Parker hopes that Boots will reinforce that empathy is one of our truest American values.
“It’s surreal,” Parker admits. “I started developing this in 2020, so that was a different time. I thought we were going to be making a period piece that was going to be speaking to a specific time in American history. I certainly didn’t know that it was going to have such poignant relevance once again, and that is truly heartbreaking. I didn’t set out to make a polemic or political statement, but what I did want to do was shine a light on the personal cost of what these policies do to people psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s so imporant to understand that those who volunteer to serve deserve to be able to do that with dignity. This also ended up being Norman Lear’s last show, and this is part of, I think, continuing and, hopefully, living up to the legacy of the shows that were about expanding what it means to be an American. I hope it allows people a greater degree of empathy.”
Boots is streaming now on Netflix.
