The hardware store in New Orleans clanged with the sound of metal on metal, the cement floor cool beneath Greg Cope White’s shoes. Eighteen years old and 13 pounds too light to join the Marines, the wiry, wide-eyed teen watched his recruiter zip through the aisles, grabbing a roll of tape, a sledgehammer, and a length of lead pipe. In the middle of the store, the recruiter dropped to his knees and began hammering the pipe flat—bam, bam, bam—the sound ricocheting off the walls. Then he stood, looked at White, and said, “Follow me.”
In the store’s bathroom, the recruiter ordered him to lower his pants. White froze, unsure what would happen next. He watched as the recruiter taped the flattened lead weight to his crotch, pulled his underwear back up, and drove him back to the recruiting office. Twenty minutes earlier, White weighed in under the minimum. Now, he passed. Seven hours later, he stood on the pavement at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina with a shaved head, thinking, What have I done?
That surreal entry into Marine life became the first chapter of The Pink Marine, White’s memoir about coming of age—and coming out—while serving in the Reagan-era Marines. That memoir now forms the basis for Boots, an eight-episode limited series premiering Oct. 9 on Netflix, starring Miles Heizer, Liam Oh, Max Parker, Ana Ayora, and Vera Farmiga.
What White found during his time in the military was a paradox: a place that demanded conformity but quietly built character. “I didn’t know it at the time, but they gave me the confidence to become myself,” he tells TIME.
The making of a Marine
White didn’t grow up dreaming of military service. His childhood moved fast—13 schools in 11 years, ricocheting across state lines and shaped by instability at home. Structure was rare; plans were rarer. But one truth was always clear. “I was aware of my sexuality very early on, and I was also aware that society was telling me there was no place for me,” he recalls.
Enlistment came unexpectedly. The summer he was 18, White got a call from his best friend Dale, who had left the Air Force Academy but still owed a military commitment. “He said, ‘I’m going to Marine Corps boot camp for the summer, and all I heard was ‘summer camp,’” White muses. “I thought, I’d love summer camp, so I said, ‘I’ll go with.’”
Boot camp didn’t match the picture in his head. He’d never seen a war movie, never run a mile. Still, the idea of reinvention beckoned. “I went in wondering where my place was in the masculine world,” White says.
They arrived at Parris Island in the dead of night: floodlights glared overhead, the rest of the base asleep. Barking drill instructors met them at the gate. “I’d never been screamed at before,” White recalls. “I thought, This isn’t anything like I imagined.”
The rules were immediate and absolute: don’t move, don’t speak, don’t think ahead. Days blurred into endless drills—wake-ups at 5 a.m., rifle training, forced marches. The pull-up test nearly broke him. He’d never done one in his life, and failure meant being separated from Dale. Worse, it meant reassignment or discharge if anyone discovered he was gay. “There were times I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to lift that boot off the ground and then make my next boot lift off the ground, but I did it,” he recalls. “I did it, because I had these really rough drill instructors yelling at me, and I had a sense of pride.”
Somehow, he made it. Over 13 grueling weeks, he built stamina, pride, and the kind of confidence he didn’t know he had. By the end, he earned a rare meritorious promotion—one of just a few in his platoon. “I thought, I am just as good as these guys, and actually better than 65 of them.”
For six years, White served in secret. On Monday mornings, when his fellow Marines swapped stories about weekends, hookups, and girlfriends, he practiced what he called “conjugational math.” He changed pronouns, edited names, and played along. But over time, the lie wore him down. “I just couldn’t lie to these guys that I was so close to, anymore,” he explains.
He chose not to reenlist. In that decision, he found a kind of peace. Looking back, the choice to join the Marines may have seemed reckless, but it became a turning point for White. “Ironically, the Marines gave me the confidence to come out,” he says. “I can walk into any room now, friendly or unfriendly. I’ll talk to anyone. That came from them.” He also credits the Marines with his lasting sense of discipline. “I haven’t needed an alarm clock since,” White adds. “Once you’ve been woken up by garbage can lids, that sticks with you.”
From memoir to screen
White’s memoir resonated with Boots creator Andy Parker in a deeply personal way. The writer and producer, whose previous work includes the 2019 Netflix adaptation of Tales of the City, based on the novels by Armistead Maupin, saw a reflection of his own history in White’s story. As a closeted teen growing up in a conservative evangelical household in Glendale, Arizona, Parker had once seriously considered joining the Marines himself. “For me, there was a time when I thought that was the answer,” he says. “So when I got Greg’s book, it felt like watching the road not taken.”
That personal connection became the emotional core of the adaptation. Rather than a literal retelling, Parker developed a fictionalized version of White’s journey, centered on a new character, Cameron Cope, and built an ensemble around him. “One of the first conversations I had with Greg was letting him know I wasn’t going to tell the story of his life,” Parker says. “I needed the freedom to craft a new character who would go on his own journey.”
That creative flexibility allowed Parker to widen the lens, developing a diverse cast of recruits who reflect the varied realities of military life—each arriving with different backgrounds, beliefs, and reasons for enlisting. “People join for all kinds of reasons, and they come from all different places,” he says. Still, one element from White’s memoir remained essential: the deep, platonic bond between a gay recruit and his straight best friend. That relationship, mirrored in the show through Cameron and Ray, became the emotional anchor. “We haven’t seen that dynamic on screen a lot, and I wanted to make sure we honored it.”
Parker, who also served as showrunner with Jennifer Cecil, viewed Boots as a chance to carry forward a legacy. The show is one of the final projects executive produced by Norman Lear, who passed away in 2023. For White, that made the moment especially meaningful: Boots is the third Lear project he’s worked on. His first big break in entertainment came in 1992, when he joined the writing staff of The Powers That Be, a political satire Lear executive produced.
Together, Parker and Cecil shifted the setting forward to 1990—three years before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy that permitted LGBTQ+ individuals to serve so long as their sexual identity remained secret. The stakes for queer service members remained life-altering. Discovery meant discharge and disgrace. Yet the era also hinted at change. That edge—between repression and revelation—infuses every frame of the series.
Heizer plays Cameron, whose quiet defiance masks a deep desire to belong; Oh plays Ray McAffey, his straight best friend and emotional anchor, a stand-in for White’s real-life friendship with Dale. Farmiga, meanwhile, portrays Cameron’s mercurial mother, and Parker brings unexpected depth to Sgt. Sullivan, the drill instructor whose hardened exterior conceals his own private battles.
Marine veterans were embedded from day one, advising during the writing process and consulting on set to adjust posture, protocol, and language. Ahead of production, the cast underwent their own condensed boot camp: marching drills, rifle range training, pack runs in the Louisiana heat where the show was filmed. “These guys started to bond in the way a real platoon does,” Cecil says. “They even stayed behind on the final day of filming to applaud the background actors.” White also served as co-executive producer and contributed to the writers’ room, ensuring the emotional texture rang true.
The courage to stop pretending
For Parker and Cecil, the story was never just about one recruit. It was about the machinery of masculinity—how it builds, how it breaks, and who reemerges intact and whole. “It’s a transformation machine,” Parker says. “Most of us don’t have to go into a place that is designed to make us face our true selves, and in such an accelerated way.”
That arc, from concealment to communion, anchors Boots. The show doesn’t shy away from the brutal aspects of training, but it makes space for absurdity too: the shared jokes, the nicknames, the quiet kindnesses between boys who don’t yet know they’re becoming men. It understands that vulnerability and toughness aren’t opposites. They’re part of the same uniform.
The series arrives at a moment when questions of identity and inclusion continue to ripple through American institutions, including the military, where debates over who gets to serve openly have once again surfaced. But Boots isn’t necessarily framed as a response to current headlines. Instead, it returns to something more elemental: the question White asked in 1979: Can I survive in this world as myself?
The show suggests the answer, while not easy, is yes: Survival and authenticity shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. Moreover, the cost of hiding is always higher than the risk of being seen.
Cecil found herself struck by that balance. “These kids are giving up their personal freedoms to become part of something bigger,” she says. “That level of sacrifice should be celebrated and applauded.”
What White hopes Boots offers to young queer viewers and to veterans who may have never shared their stories is a sense of recognition. “I want young people to know that, just like I said earlier, you get to walk through any door,” he says. “Nothing is off limits to us. If you want this world, get in that world.”
He still marvels at how far his story has traveled, from that New Orleans hardware store bathroom to a glowing billboard advertising Boots now in New York City’s Times Square. “I think too many people believe what society tells them—that they can’t do something, or shouldn’t be visible, or shouldn’t be out and proud and loud,” he adds. “But if it’s safe for you, live your authentic life. We’re stronger when we’re authentic. That’s what I learned in the military. Had I been able to live as my authentic self, I would’ve been like a super Marine.”
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