BOOTS
Created by Andy Parker
Netflix
WHILE YOU WERE busy watching the sports romance Heated Rivalry as it crashed a Zamboni named Desire into a wall of spectators, you may have missed Boots. It too is interested in gay history and the closet in a traditionally masculine milieu—sans the ice skates, six-packs, and unsexy sex scenes. It’s also funnier and more empathic. In the pilot, “The Pink Marine,” the ironies multiply. Ray, rejected by the Air Force Academy due to poor eyesight, encourages his best friend Cameron “Cam” Cope to enlist with him in the Marine Corps because, as he sees it, Cam needs a clearer “vision” for his future.
Actor Miles Heizer plays the eighteen-year-old hero, a stand-in for Greg Cope White, author of a 2015 memoir also titled The Pink Marine. White served as a producer of the series, along with Andy Parker and the late, great Norman Lear (who also left the trans-positive Clean Slate behind on his death at age 101). On the bus ride from New Orleans to boot camp, Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” provides the musical accompaniment to the look of consternation on Cam’s face. “Love Is a Battlefield” might have better supported the central conceit of Boots: that living in the closet—make that green camouflage—is literally fatiguing.
The main irony here is that Cam goes from being a high schooler having his head dunked in a toilet bowl to a military recruit who’s routinely tortured by drill sergeants, all in the name of “character formation.” LGBT viewers will easily identify with Cam’s marginalization and with the slow smothering of his inner self, which he describes as an “angel on [his]shoulder.” This is a heavier boot on Cam’s neck, less an angel than a phantom who manifests the life he could have lived. Yet, as the poet W. H. Auden put it in The Age of Anxiety, the “bruise of his boyhood is as blue still,/ Horrid and hurting, hostile to his life. … He pines for some/ Nameless Eden where he never was.”
Anxiety is a prevailing theme in Boots, and Cam’s worried mother Barbara (Vera Farmiga) complicates matters. In a record-scratch moment, she tries to help but only causes more pain by revealing the details of Cam’s origin story, which she had hidden from him all his life. “I may not have been the best mother in the world,” she tells a support group, “but I didn’t deserve to lose my son.” One more irony is that her son is already busy losing himself. The setting is crucial: It’s 1990, four years before the enactment of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and 35 years before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. military leaders to reevaluate all policies put in place since 1990, particularly protections for people of color and LGBT personnel. If only Cam hadn’t ignored Ray’s recommendation that he watch Full Metal Jacket and tuned into a Golden Girls marathon instead, he might have avoided such savagery. Parker, incidentally, pitched Boots to Netflix as “Full Metal Jacket as told by David Sedaris.”
Among the troglodytes who target Cam as the weakest among the recruits—“kinda faggy,” as he’s described, “but at least he’s read a book”—is Sergeant Sullivan (Max Parker), a sad-eyed shell of a man who’s as hard-boiled as they come. Shown in flashback, Sullivan has a romantic history with Major Wilkinson, and the pair are under investigation for “conduct unbecoming and sodomy.” Red flag? Sullivan kills at karaoke. As a casualty of the closet, and the ghost of Christmas yet to come, he gives Cam a bit of bad advice: “You have to bury your old self to become your best self.” Sullivan’s abuse of alcohol suggests that he’s burying himself in more self-destructive ways, and accordingly, Cam’s bunkmate pegs him as a “self-hating bully.” This serves as an alert to Cam’s inner self, who, materializing once again like a genie from a lamp, chides him by saying: “You’ve been avoiding me.”
Do you like trash-can lids clanged like cymbals to shake you out of a bunk bed, drill sergeants shouting “Kill!” within inches of your face, or group showers with naked men in buzz cuts and dog tags? If only one of those three experiences appeals to you, then you’re a lot like Cam. Just as Sullivan sees himself in Cam, like-minded viewers may as well. The gay couple in Heated Rivalry is meant to be looked at; Boots invites you to empathize. For me, that moment of self-recognition occurred as early as the first episode, when Cam is shown ineptly shaving in the mirror. “Is that how they shave on your planet?” a fellow jarhead asks him before grabbing the razor from his hand.
Mirror, mirror on the wall. I had a loving and attentive father who somehow forgot to teach me to shave. It wasn’t until college that my roommate, standing shirtless beside me at the sink, looked over and said: “Do it like I do it, dummy! Go with the grain.” It was an oddly tender moment for a prankster who liked to see me redden after hot-gluing my name in M&Ms to my headboard and turning all the furniture on my side of the dorm room upside down. He and his buddies never laughed so hard. This is what makes that brief exchange so affecting, because even in the most brutish of environments, a bond is forged as a perfect stranger treats Cam as a brother in arms. A second season of Boots would have shown how Cam, on the outside, survived the Persian Gulf War and, on the inside, learned to replace all that inner turmoil with inner peace. Would he have accessed his very own Eden, nameless or not? Unfortunately, we’ll never know, because, unlike Heated Rivalry, Boots was not renewed for a second season.
Colin Carman, PhD, a regular contributor to these pages, is the author of The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment (2020).
