Active Duty (AD) has been around (over 15 years I think), they've had very, very few people from other sites/studios to come to AD. Usually at most you might have one in some given year, but the average is less. The only other guys who were already in porn (that I know of) who then came to AD were:
1. Devon, who was originally Kent Cummings from Dirty Tony where he really only did solo work (except Tony fingered him near the end of a scene). He went a little further at AD, allowing another guy (Ransom) to give him head.
![Kent_cummings_dirtytony_aka_devon_activeduty_01]( "Kent_cummings_dirtytony_aka_devon_activeduty_01")
![Kent_cummings_dirtytony_aka_devon_activeduty_02]( "Kent_cummings_dirtytony_aka_devon_activeduty_02")
2. Brock, who I think got his start at Randy Blue, but has done some work at some of the big studios.
![Brock_randyblue_to_activeduty_01]( "Brock_randyblue_to_activeduty_01")
![Brock_randyblue_to_activeduty_02]( "Brock_randyblue_to_activeduty_02")
3. Barrett Long, whose reputation precedes him. I think he got his start back with Dirk Yates or All World's Video, though I'm not sure. Though in Barrett's case, Dink Flamingo specifically mentioned in his first scene at AD that he had wanted to work with him for a while and that Barrett worked elsewhere.
![Barrettlong_activeduty]( "Barrettlong_activeduty")
4. Bentley, he started at Amateur Straight Guys when AD acquired it. So he "may" not count.
![Bentley_asg_activeduty_01]( "Bentley_asg_activeduty_01")
![Bentley_asg_activeduty_02]( "Bentley_asg_activeduty_02")
5. Brian, though he may have started at Active Duty. I know he worked at Dirk Yates (DY), but it gets murky sometimes with some of the military guys on the west coast determining whether they started with AD or DY as there was some overlap there for a while, especially in the early days of AD.
![Brian_activeduty]( "Brian_activeduty")
6. Jack, who was originally Jack Lee way back at Chaos Men, and who did lots of AD's webcams.
![Jack_lee_chaosmen_aka_jack_activeduty_01]( "Jack_lee_chaosmen_aka_jack_activeduty_01")
![Jack_lee_chaosmen_aka_jack_activeduty_02]( "Jack_lee_chaosmen_aka_jack_activeduty_02")
7. Kasey, who I think started at Corbin Fisher way back as Taylor, who also did lots of AD's webcam shows for a while.
![Taylor_corbinfisher_aka_kasey_activeduty_01]( "Taylor_corbinfisher_aka_kasey_activeduty_01")
![Taylor_corbinfisher_aka_kasey_activeduty_02]( "Taylor_corbinfisher_aka_kasey_activeduty_02")
8. And perhaps most famously Mason Wyler prior to him announcing he was HIV+, who started as Mason at Corbin Fisher.
![Mason_wyler_corbinfisher_activeduty_01]( "Mason_wyler_corbinfisher_activeduty_01")
![Mason_wyler_corbinfisher_activeduty_02]( "Mason_wyler_corbinfisher_activeduty_02")
9 & 10 being James II/Jimmy Johnson and Dalton/Dakota Ford.
![Dalton_jimmy_activeduty_01]( "Dalton_jimmy_activeduty_01")
![Dalton_jimmy_activeduty_02]( "Dalton_jimmy_activeduty_02")
They've had a pretty good track record of being original in their casting (and almost all of the ones they got from other studios claimed to be ex-military). But two new guys from other sites in a six week time frame seemed a bit odd to me. When you couple that with the fact that Dink seems very hands off nowadays, I wondered if he had stopped (or severely limited) his recruiting efforts. Historically, you could hear Dink joke around with the models before/during/after scenes and there would be copious stories about how Dink met the guys (usually in Walmart's men's underwear department), how they hung out at his house, went to bars together, had crazy parties at Dink's, etc. Also, Dink used to "direct" the scenes... telling the guys what to do, and egging the top on to get rougher on the bottom. You don't hear any of that now whatsoever, even if Dink does make an appearance. And when he does, it's usually mentioning that the model was introduced to him through Major Wood instead of being recruited by Dink.
I say all of that to say, I think the quality of the site has gone down considerably over the past two or so years, and I think that drop correlates quite closely with Dink's absence (and perhaps it also correlates with Dink moving Active Duty from North Carolina to California). His site used to be like watching a gay sex reality show or Real World where Dink was the ring leader in his own gay circus, now there's almost no personality in the scenes at all. None of that even mentions that they lost tons of archived webcam shows around the time of their new website launch and even after indicating they'd get them restored, they never did. And they never have live shows anymore even though it's a major feature to the site (and the cost). They've recently been heavily pushing subscriptions to Amateur Straight Guys in their email newsletter to members, even though the content on ASG is mostly quite old. All this plus these two new recruits being from other major porn sites may be an indicator that we're about to see Active Duty either take a further nose dive due to farming out for talent, or that they're about to change their format and begin bringing more models in if they have a passingly military appearance. In any case, I can say that Active Duty was the first gay porn site I ever patronized and was for a long time my favorite, and now I barely recognize it.
[this post was written by James]