'Boots' Wants You for a New Recruit
The Netflix series about a gay teen who impulsively joins the Marines in 1990 manages to evoke the past while commenting on the retrograde present
October 18, 2025
A week ago, I caught a NewFest screening of Episode 1 of Boots, a series about 17-year-old gay kid Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer) who, at the dawn of the ‘90s, adds a year to his age and follows his straight bestie Ray (Liam Oh) into the Marines, both to find himself and to lose his inattentive mom.
Based on the 2015 memoir The Pink Marine by Greg Cope White, Boots, even in a limited taste, turned out to beat all allegations of high-profile queer content having limited taste. In short, it was so instantly remarkable I marched home and binged it on Netflix (you should pardon the expression) straight away.
As soon as it opens, Boots — the last project to bear the late Norman Lear’s name — reveals itself, quite miraculously, to be a pitch-perfect ensemble piece that uses Cameron’s experience as a lens on the similarly emotionally raw experiences of the other recruits, some of them familiar types but all of them carefully shaded to keep each story engrossing, even though most of their stories are not queer.
In the space of eight episodes, the show manages not only to craft in Cope a flesh-and-blood queer character whose sexual orientation isn’t his biggest problem, but also to explore the backgrounds (and hopes and fears) of Ray (pushed into the Marines by his demanding, retired-Marine dad); villainous Sgt. Sullivan (Max Parker), himself a closet case; soft-hearted newlywed Ochoa (Johnathan Nieves); thuggish Slovacek (Kieron Moore); the Bowman twins, one large (Blake Burt) and one in charge (Brandon Tyler Moore), who have been pitted against each other by their father; sneaky queer newbie Jones (Jack Cameron Kay), a manipulative sleepwalker who’s sleeping on his chance to sleep with Cameron; principled Nash (Dominic Goodman); creepy Hicks (Angus O’Brien); and others, including officers and Cameron’s reliably unreliable mom (Vera Farmiga, in possibly my favorite of her performances to date).
On October 17, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson, a 26-year-old who is anti-Semitic, hates Black Lives Matter and believes in the Great Replacement Theory in spite of being Hispanic, sneered that Boots is “woke garbage,” giving away that Republicans think reality itself is woke. Boots has an incredibly diverse cast, but not just for the sake of diversity — it’s a reflection of the fact that Black and brown recruits have for decades been a huge part of the armed services, as have LGBTQ+ folks. To show that on TV isn’t woke, it is the truth, something the Trump Administration is warring with on a daily basis.