From ‘Gomer Pyle’ to ‘Boots,' and the long, stagnant march of acceptance for the gay Marine

In the mid-1960s, America tuned in weekly to watch Gomer Pyle, the lovable, bumbling Marine portrayed by Jim Nabors. Gomer was naive, innocent, and ridiculously optimistic. He was lovable, even begrudgingly to his commanding officer, Sgt. Vince Carter, played by Frank Sutton.

Gomer Pyle: USMC ran from 1964 to 1969, and I watched it in reruns while growing up during the 1970s. I can somewhat recall conversations with my classmates about Nabors being gay and being married to Rock Hudson. So the idea of them being gay, whatever that meant, was introduced to me early in my formative years.

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At that time, I remember learning that Nabors and I shared a birthday, June 12, and thinking that maybe being born on that day made you feel “different” like I did. It was all so confusing. And given the scuttlebutt around Nabors, I never spoke about liking the show. Guilt by association.

Gomer was a character we all liked because of his simplicity and his admirable attributes. He was kind to everyone and honest to a fault. He could sing too, as Nabors did in real life. Gomer seemed to always maintain his good humor in the face of all the absurdity his clumsiness created, especially when it came to screwing up Sgt. Carter’s life.

On-screen, Gomer was guileless, harebrained, and wholesome. Yet behind the scenes, Jim Nabors was a quietly closeted gay man, navigating Hollywood and an American audience that would have rejected him had his sexuality become public.

While he brought warmth, comedic humor, and an aw-shucks kindness to the masculine environment of the Marines, he was performing a double life, one that required absolute discretion and careful management of his public persona.

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The show itself reinforced that persona. To preserve the image of heterosexuality, Gomer was given a girlfriend, Lou-Anne Poovie, as was Sgt. Carter, who was paired with Miss Bunny.

I think it was important for the show’s producers to make sure Nabors's portrayal was very different from who he was off-screen.

Nabors would not publicly acknowledge his sexuality until long after the show’s run. He lived a private life that would only be revealed decades later, when he married his longtime partner, Stan Cadwallader, after nearly 40 years together.

The dichotomy between a gay man playing a straight Marine during the 1960s would have been earth-shattering; yet today, it’s almost something to shrug at.

Sixty years later, we have Netflix’s Boots, which has a gay man playing a gay Marine, and the sky didn’t fall. I binged watched the series over the past weekend and was impressed.

The late Norman Lear was one of the executive producers. It’s too bad he didn’t live to see it completed, because I think he would have been proud. While I watched it, I wondered if Lear had thought about Gomer Pyle while he helped get Boots off the ground.

Related: Boots: How a closeted Marine's story became a Netflix show

Boots brilliantly explores what it means to be a gay Marine in a period just before the military implemented “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The show follows Cameron Cope, a teenager from a small town who enlists in the Marine Corps alongside his best friend, Ray.

Unlike Nabors, actor Miles Heizer is an out gay man. Heizer’s Cameron is immediately confronted with the strict culture of military life and the need to hide his identity since he would receive a dishonorable discharge if he was outed.

Related: Former Defense Chief: 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Repeal Was Good for All

What makes Boots so compelling is that it shows the weight of that secrecy. Cameron’s every glance, every hesitation, and instance of insinuation carries the risk of exposure. The series is described as a “dramedy,” but to me it’s much more serious.

It’s particularly stark for one of Cameron’s drill instructors, Sgt. Liam Robert Sullivan, played by a gay actor, Max Parker. His story is deeply painful because it shows how his forced and tortured oppression of his sexuality leads to tragic consequences.

Where Nabors had to live the truth behind the scenes and perform innocence on-screen, Cameron performs both on-screen and within the story. It’s like a double performance that resonates deeply with anyone who has navigated spaces where authenticity could be dangerous — say, the current U.S. military, thanks to the destructive Pete Hegseth.

The repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2011 was a milestone, yet Christian conservatives and white straight male pressures, along with institutional inertia and political figures like Donald Trump and Hegseth, are advocating a return to exclusionary norms

It’s a reminder that all that progress is fragile at best.

The period from Gomer Pyle to Boots also illuminates how Marines still embody a version of manhood that is disciplined, stoic, and ostensibly heterosexual. Nabors’s Gomer in today’s world, and maybe even back then, was not the arbiter of masculinity for sure.

And as is pointed out in Boots, Cameron Cope is the weakling among his trainees. Which in a sense makes his concealment and constant vigilance even more urgent. That is another similarity between Gomer and Cameron, but Gomer’s sexuality was never called into question. Whereas Cameron’s is, courtesy of an exposed diary entry by one of fellow soldiers who writes that he’s “faggy.”

There is a beautiful irony in considering Jim Nabors’ svoice as part of this continuum. His rich baritone allowed glimpses of authenticity even when he could not claim it publicly. When Gomer sang on the show, audiences received a flicker of the tenderness and humanity Nabors carried in real life.

But again, the outlier of an operatic-singing Marine like Gomer would have surely had his sexuality questioned at that time, not on the show, but in the public eye.

Today, out gay people can serve in the Marines, and actors like Miles Heizer can portray their stories without fear for their own lives. Yet it’s abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that being an out Marine is still not entirely safe. So, in an odd and sad way, Nabor's hidden private life is perhaps no different than that of some Marines in Hegseth’s military of 2025.

I was imagining Nabors watching Boots and thinking how poignant that would be. Perhaps he would be grateful that a generation could finally see what he never could show. But then I thought maybe it would be too painful for him, remembering all those years of secrecy.

Gomer Pyle’s favorite catchphrases, “Golly,” “Shazam,” and “Surprise, surprise, surprise” were simple exclamations that became part of the 1960s' social lexicon.

I was thinking about those words and how they might just as easily trace the journey of a gay Marine, from the wide-eyed naïveté of concealment to the lightning bolt of coming out to the astonishment of finally marching openly in uniform, unafraid.

But under Hegseth’s “war” department, that journey could end not in pride but in peril, a dark “Shazam” signaling rights erased in a flash, followed by a bitter “Surprise, surprise, surprise” as decades of progress come tumbling down.

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