Boots - Netflix and The Pink Marine - Greg Cope White
Netflix softens the danger Greg Cope White actually lived through, turning felony-level fear into flirtation.
When I first saw the previews for Netflix’s new “dramedy” Boots, I was curious. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of performative masculinity—what it means to “be a man,” and who gets to decide. I write about the worlds I know: an all-male college, fraternity life, corporate life - the rituals that shape boys into something approximating men. I remember what that felt like from the inside, as someone who was different but didn’t yet have the language for it.
Honestly, I was also looking forward to what I knew was going to be a charged environment—the barracks, the showers, the enforced closeness. I knew exactly how those scenes would look: the same choreography of exposed skin and unspoken rules I’d seen in locker rooms and fraternity basements. What was once a site of anxiety now felt like a chance to see it rendered openly, even tenderly.
I don’t dismiss what Marine training is designed to do. For all its brutality, the process is rooted in something real and proven: teaching men to operate as a single unit, to trust one another in situations where hesitation can kill. Breaking recruits down and rebuilding them into a team isn’t just theater—it works. Many describe it as life-changing. And for most, it is.
But as Alan Downs wrote in The Velvet Rage, those systems—military, athletic, fraternal—are built on a template of masculinity that fits most men well enough to function. The masks are designed to fit, even if they chafe. For queer men, though, that molding process can be catastrophic. What shapes one life can erase another.
The new Netflix series Boots opens with a drill instructor’s voice slicing through dawn mist. “Sound off!” he yells, and a chorus of recruits answers back. In some ways, it’s the sound of erasure—young men learning to move in unison, to trade individuality for obedience and discipline.
The show follows Cameron Cope, a closeted teenager who enlists in the Marines with his straight best friend. It’s loosely adapted from Greg Cope White’s memoir The Pink Marine, though that’s where the resemblance mostly ends. White’s book was a raw recollection of joining the Corps in 1979, stepping into a world that looked a lot more like Full Metal Jacket than the sanitized comedy of Stripes. Boot camp then was both forge and crucible—designed to strip men bare before rebuilding them into something the Marine Corps could use. For some, that process made them stronger. For others, it erased them.
Netflix moves that story to a safer, glossier nineties setting—nostalgia in uniform. Critics have praised Boots—91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, polite applause everywhere else. They call it heartfelt, well-acted, balanced. They’re not wrong, but they’re grading on a curve. The show succeeds mostly by avoiding the full horror of what it claims to represent.
Cameron, played by Miles Heizer, isn’t confused about who he is. He’s a young man who understands his own difference too clearly and too soon. That’s one of the series’ strange choices: he speaks with the fluency of someone decades older, as if already through therapy. Real eighteen-year-olds don’t analyze themselves like memoirists; they stumble, they deflect, they survive without language. The book’s Greg was terrified and naïve. The show’s Cameron is enlightened, which makes his fear feel cosmetic.
The show also invents a fellow gay recruit named Jones, meant to serve as Cameron’s mirror—someone whose gaze lingers a beat too long during drills and showers. In one scene, he winks. It’s convenient for storytelling and impossible for the time. In the real Marine Corps of that era, those glances would have been a kind of suicide. One whisper, one accusation, and a recruit could be gone before sundown. Boots turns danger into longing, rewriting peril as romance. It’s a pretty lie, and maybe the cruelest one.
Even more fabricated is the closeted drill instructor, DI Sullivan, who takes what the show frames as the “honorable” way out—suicide implied but never shown. He wasn’t in the book; Netflix added him to give the story symmetry, an older shadow to Cameron’s awakening. The problem is that his death becomes tidy metaphor instead of indictment. The series treats it as solemn and noble, when in reality it’s just the final act of discipline—a man so consumed by shame he follows orders even into the grave. The Corps worshipped order; in that world, self-destruction could look like obedience.
The truth is far worse. In 1979, homosexuality wasn’t merely frowned upon in the military—it was a felony. Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice classified “sodomy” as a criminal offense, punishable by court-martial and up to five years in prison. Lying about it on enlistment forms counted as fraudulent enlistment, another felony and a Federal crime. Greg Cope White didn’t just risk ridicule; he risked confinement and a dishonorable discharge that would shadow him for life.
If a Marine like DI Sullivan had faced the machinery that awaited him, his ruin would’ve been total. First, an investigation by NCIS; then questioning, locker searches, confiscated mail, interrogation of recruits. He’d have been stripped of command, marched off the drill field in disgrace, tried under Article 125, imprisoned, reduced to E-1, forfeited pay, dishonorably discharged, and barred from every federal benefit. Civilian life afterward meant unemployment, stigma, and a DD-214 stamped Homosexual Conduct. Some men changed names; others didn’t survive the shame. For Sullivan, suicide would’ve seemed less like tragedy and more like protocol—a way to disappear neatly before the system could finish the job.
That’s the real context for those glances between recruits. Critics keep wishing the show had pushed further—more tension, more romance—but they don’t understand that in 1979, the act of looking was already an act of defiance. Desire wasn’t repressed so much as criminalized. Every quiet glance carried the weight of federal law. Boots turns that danger into flirtation, missing that the fear was the story.
What makes this sting is knowing what Greg Cope White actually lived through. When he enlisted, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” didn’t exist because the words themselves were unthinkable. There were no sympathetic sergeants, no quiet allies, no other gay recruits trading secret glances. There was only silence—total and punishing. Every instinct to connect was crushed under the weight of performance. Netflix smooths that brutality into something palatable—retro aesthetics, soft-focus empathy, a playlist of safe emotions.
That softening isn’t confined to the barracks. Amazon’s Overcompensating tries to mock frat-boy masculinity by indulging it—keg stands, protein shakes, panic attacks turned into punchlines. It calls itself satire but still worships the insecurity it claims to expose, starring thirty-year-old fitness models as nineteen-year-olds. It perpetuates the same impossible body standards those of us who came of age in the eighties and nineties were fed without question—abs and silence sold as manhood. We didn’t see it for what it was: a culture grooming its boys, polishing them for the gaze of older men who wrote the rules. Back then, the models weren’t icons; they were props—told to wear their pants a size too big so they’d hang just right. The fraternity house isn’t the opposite of the barracks; it’s the training ground. Different stakes, same doctrine. Both teach that emotion is weakness, that belonging requires performance, that silence keeps you safe.
There’s danger in cleaning up stories like this. The moment you start sanding down the edges, you start lying. Every softened punch, every polite glance is a betrayal of the people who lived the unfiltered version. Boots means well, but it turns endurance into entertainment. Once the pain looks pretty enough to stream, it stops being remembered for what it was.
What modern audiences miss is how absolute that danger was. They’ve inherited vocabulary instead of memory—words like repression and representation without the weight those words once carried. They watch Boots and want more affection, more risk, more heat, never realizing that in 1979, risk meant confinement and heat meant evidence. For men like Greg Cope White—or DI Sullivan, had he existed—one glance too long could end a life as thoroughly as a bullet.
That’s what keeps getting lost in translation: the magnitude of what it cost to survive unseen. The distance between shame and prison, silence and safety. The world changed, thankfully—but every time the past is rewritten to make us comfortable, that change gets a little harder to see.
Despite everything I wrote above, I still enjoyed it. Some myths are too familiar to resist, and the casting doesn’t hurt either. But the bigger story is that Netflix produced it at all—a show about gay Marines, now sitting in the platform’s Top 10, led by three openly gay young actors. In 1979, that would have been unthinkable. Today, it’s a hit. That alone feels worth celebrating.
Further Reading & Viewing
The Pink Marine
Greg Cope White’s original memoir—the raw, funny, and often painful account that inspired Boots. A first-person look at what it meant to join the Marines as a closeted teenager in 1979. Signed copies of the book are also available on the author’s website.
Conduct Unbecoming
Randy Shilts’s definitive investigation into gay service members in the U.S. military, tracing decades of secrecy, courage, and institutional hypocrisy. Essential context for understanding how far we’ve come—and how far we haven’t. This was one of my recent used book finds, a like new hardback copy for $3.00
Boots
Netflix’s dramatization of The Pink Marine—beautifully shot, unevenly honest, but impossible to look away from. For all its flaws, I still found myself moved by it. Maybe that’s the trap, or maybe it’s the proof that tenderness can survive even the softest retelling.
Overcompensating
Amazon’s satire of frat-house masculinity and modern insecurity—uneasy, funny, and revealing in all the ways it doesn’t mean to be. Just picked up for a second season.
I definitely need to leave a review but it was excellent. I’m really curious as to what becomes of Sullivan and I’m even more interested about everything that happened in Guam. I liked the glimpse into the backstory but clearly there’s more there.
Thank you for writing about this. I’ll post my take in a few days. I was going to ask you about Full Metal Jacket/Short timers too. It’s a Kubrick film with bootcamp that feels very accurate and I didn’t leave that film thinking patriotism or praise of the Marines. In Boots, there is still a feeling of marine pride here and there. I’m wondering why boots went this route.