Alex Durham, 29, of Jackson City, MI, has gone about his daily routine and obligations for over a decade, totally unaware of the massive sexual impact he had on eleven different young women in his graduating class at Lamonte High School. He was the only straight male member of the drama club at school, and every hormonal, awkward, artsy young woman in the program still thinks of him as the primary template of the ideal man.
“He was the hottest, most talented, only straight guy in the whole club. You don’t forget that kind of man,” says Lamonte grad Kiki Hooper, who understudied Curly’s Wife in 2003’s Of Mice and Men. “Anytime I’m out with a new guy, I think, ‘Well, he’s as charming as Alex, but definitely not as funny,’ or ‘He’s like a shorter Alex,’ or ‘I wonder what would happen if I called Alex.’”
Even as they go about their various office jobs and date nights, the female alumni of the Lamonte High School drama program keep Durham at the forefront of their mind as the representation of what a good man is. “Here’s this guy who does theater and is also secure enough in his masculinity to wear stage makeup, and then you find out he’s straight,” says former co-stage manager Danni Brooke. “When you encounter that kind of perfection at 16, you never forget it.”
Durham reportedly has not done any theater since his senior year at Lamonte, where he starred as Ren in Footloose, and has no interest in it anymore. “It was just a fun and an easy way to round out my college applications,” Durham comments. “People always ask if it was good for meeting girls, but they were all kind of weird, honestly.”
All eleven women, over a decade later, still think about Durham during any sexual encounters that they have, and always wonder in the back of their minds how much better their lives would be if things had just worked out with that studly leading straight man from their high school drama class. They report that Durham was the first time that they could interact with a strong, confident, datable man who wasn’t gay and who was also a good singer, which is, as Lamonte set builder Rachel Terranova puts it, “the biggest turn-on when you’re 15 and have never been exposed to culture before.”
“To this day, I get so turned on thinking about the time Alex let me use my curling iron on his hair, just as a goof,” says Catie Weiner, who was okay as Anita in West Side Story. “My fiancé is nice, but he’d never let me do that. I’m having doubts.”
Durham now works at a software company and lives in Jackson City with his skinny wife and three blonde sons, absolutely in the dark as to how much longing and idealism is associated with his teenage self.
The woman commented that they would marry any and all of the other men in the program instantly, too, if only they weren’t gay (especially Jacob).
