Adam's Story: Coming Out
Adam Bridgeman: Openly Gay
Adam Bridgeman is Dante's sixteen-year-old younger brother and one of the novel's two co-narrators. From the novel's opening, Adam is openly gay. He is not hiding his identity from his family or from the world. He has known he was gay since he was thirteen and, as he states in the novel, he likes it: "I've known I was gay since I was thirteen. And what's more, I like it." This is not a secret whispered in private. It is a statement of self-knowledge and, ultimately, self-acceptance.
Adam faces bullying at school specifically because he is openly gay. The bullying is not triggered by the discovery of a hidden secret — it is a response to the fact that he has refused to hide who he is. Blackman uses Adam's storyline to examine the social cost of being openly different in an environment that punishes difference. Adam's challenge is not concealment. It is survival.
Adam is openly gay. He is out at school and his family are aware or come to be aware of his sexuality. The bullying he faces is the result of a hostile environment responding to his openness — not the result of his secret being exposed.
Josh: The Secret Relationship
Within the novel, Adam enters into a secret relationship with Josh — one of Dante's friends. This relationship is at the heart of the most important thematic threads in the book. But it is essential to understand what kind of relationship this is.
Josh is deeply closeted and ashamed. He is not comfortable with his sexuality. He cannot accept that he is gay, and he cannot accept that he is in a relationship with Adam. The relationship is conducted entirely in secret — at Josh's insistence. Adam must not tell anyone. They must not be seen together. Josh controls the terms of their relationship, and those terms are dictated by his own internalised homophobia.
For Adam, this is painful. He is open. He has accepted himself. He is now in a relationship with someone who is ashamed of him — and ashamed of himself. The contrast between Adam's openness and Josh's shame is one of Blackman's most precise and devastating character constructions.
Internalised homophobia is the process by which someone absorbs society's negative attitudes towards gay people and applies them to themselves. Josh has grown up in a social world — Dante's friend group — where homophobia is casual and accepted. He cannot imagine being openly gay and surviving in that world. Rather than questioning the world, Josh questions himself: he is ashamed of his attraction to Adam, ashamed of the relationship, and desperate to prove to himself and others that he is not gay. This shame, left unaddressed, becomes the engine of violence.
Josh Is Not a Symbol of Acceptance
It would be a fundamental misreading of the novel to describe Josh as a symbol of acceptance or normality in Adam's life. Josh does not prove that Adam's sexuality is natural and healthy. Josh is not a positive presence. He is a source of shame, secrecy, and ultimately catastrophic violence.
Josh's function in the novel is precisely the opposite of acceptance: he embodies the damage that internalised homophobia inflicts — first on himself, and then on Adam. Their relationship does not offer Adam moments of uncomplicated happiness. It offers a connection that must be concealed, built on the foundation of Josh's self-loathing. When that self-loathing reaches its crisis point, the consequences for Adam are devastating.
Josh is not a symbol of acceptance. He is deeply closeted, ashamed of his own sexuality, and insists the relationship remain hidden. His arc demonstrates the destructive effects of internalised homophobia — not the validation of Adam's identity.
The Setup for the Attack
Later in the novel, at a party following Dante's eighteenth birthday at a pub called the Bar Belle, Adam is outed. The exposure of Adam's sexuality in a social context — in front of Dante's friends — creates the conditions for what follows.
It is later revealed that Logan — another of Dante's friends — engineers the attack as a test: Josh must prove he is not gay. The logic is vicious. Josh, closeted and desperate to protect himself, participates. He does not protect Adam. He becomes one of Adam's attackers. This is covered fully in Lesson 5, but it is important to establish here the trajectory that Josh's internalised homophobia sets in motion.
Blackman structures the contrast between Adam and Josh very precisely. Adam is openly gay and faces the external consequences of that openness — bullying, hostility, social isolation. Josh is closeted and faces the internal consequences of that concealment — shame, self-denial, violence. Blackman suggests that the external hostility Adam faces and the internal destruction Josh experiences are both products of the same homophobic environment. The novel does not ask which is worse. It shows how the same poison kills in different ways.
Blackman's Authorial Purpose
Blackman, who was Children's Laureate from 2013 to 2015, has spoken about her reasons for writing this novel. She wanted to explore masculinity, identity, and the cost of conformity — particularly for young men who are told, implicitly or explicitly, that there are things they cannot be if they want to be accepted. Adam's storyline is her most direct examination of the cost of homophobia: not just for those who face it from outside, but for those who have absorbed it inside themselves.
The novel was published in 2010, before marriage equality in England and Wales (which came in 2014). The social context it describes — in which being openly gay as a teenager means sustained bullying and risk of violence — was and remains real. Blackman chose not to soften this reality. Adam's experience is presented without false resolution: being openly gay does not protect him from violence. But it also does not break him.