Netflix has once again drawn the ire of the Trump administration — this time over the release of its latest minidrama, Boots.
The eight-episode series, which has become a sleeper hit since its release on the platform on October 9, is based on the 2016 coming-of-age memoir The Pink Marine by former U.S. Marine sergeant Greg Cope White.
In a statement addressing Boots’ LGBT+ themes, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson decried what she called the streamer’s “woke garbage.”
She told Entertainment Weekly that military officials “will not compromise our standards to satisfy an ideological agenda, unlike Netflix whose leadership consistently produces and feeds woke garbage to their audience and children.”
Starring Miles Heiz as a fictionalized version of Cope White, the series is inspired by the author’s experience as a closeted gay teenager who enlisted in the Marines at a time when it was illegal for gay individuals to serve in the military.
Born and raised in Texas, Cope White, now 65, was just 18 when he agreed to enlist in the military alongside his straight friend Dale. It was the summer of 1979 when the two signed up for Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina.
A scrawny, closeted gay boy, Cope White not only had to cheat to pass the physical, but he also had to lie about his sexuality in the enlistment paperwork. At that point, it was still years before the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was enacted in 1993, allowing LGBT+ people to serve in the military as long as they remained silent about their sexual orientation, and decades before openly gay service members were officially permitted to serve in 2011.
Cope White made it through the arduous boot camp, where he unexpectedly found a group of “oddballs and eccentrics” that would become his future brotherhood.
For six years, he served in the military as a communications specialist, keeping his sexuality a secret, even though he had come out privately to his friends and family by the early 1980s.
Still, the weight of holding in such a big secret took an exhausting toll on Cope White, leading him to eventually leave the armed forces in 1985. “The Marines is a place to find your authentic self,” the author told the BBC. “But I wasn’t allowed to be my authentic self, and I couldn’t continue being inauthentic with people that I admired and respected so much.”
Following his honorable discharge from the military, Cope White pursued a career in television writing. One of his earlier jobs saw him work with the late Norman Lear as a writer on the short-lived Nineties sitcoms The Powers That Be and 704 Hauser. Lear, who had previously served as a technical sergeant in the Army Air Forces in World War II, bonded with Cope White over their shared military experience, forging a decades-long friendship.
“Norman loved the sergeant element of my life, and he loved exploring stories of ‘other,’” Cope White said to The New York Times. “His years of mentorship and swapping stories with me about his own time in the military really gave me that foundation to start writing my book.”
In an interview with Forbes, he explained that his motivation for writing the book came from the harrowing stories about young teenagers who died by suicide after they were bullied for being gay.
“It made me think of the hell that I went through in boot camp and how difficult it was to survive that, but I just kept putting one boot in front of the other. I knew that it would hopefully get better, but when you’re in it, it’s awful,” he said.
Created by Andy Parker, Boots is not a biopic — Cope White, who wrote one of the episodes, has made sure to clarify that. “Our showrunner opened it up to explore the entire platoon — many characters from the book, some newly created,” he told janefriedman.com.
“Cameron Cope and Ray McAffey are based on me and Dale, but we also take them to places I never did. And I am very proud of the way Miles Heizer and Liam Oh portray their characters. I write both and love them both — together and separately.”
To ensure complete accuracy of the details, three Marine veterans, including Cope White, were involved in the writers’ room, while an additional three Marine veterans joined the production as Military Technical Advisors.
Besides the altered names and storylines, the series also features a significant shift from the 1980s to the 1990s, just before the Gulf War, leaving open the possibility for a second season.
Cope White was also excited about that timeline jump because “so much was happening in the Nineties,” he told Forbes, referring to the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
“Other men were serving that were also gay, and everybody had to pretend that they weren’t. It was scary. In boot camp, I was so terrified of anyone finding out my secret, mainly because several weeks in, I started finding my footing. For the first time, I was being told I was good at something,” he said.
“To be told I was doing a good job was so stunning to me that I didn’t want to lose that. I finally found something I was good at, and I didn’t want it taken away. Meryl Streep couldn’t have butched it up for 13 weeks like I did.”
Boots is streaming now on Netflix.
