The Hustler: Johnny Harden Revealed
A face & dick of the '70s, he left porn in the '80s and futilely tried to police his former image while creating new identities, cultivating a mystique before dying in 2023
December 13, 2025
Love and Death
On Monday, February 27, 2023, at 5:33 p.m., 67-year-old white male Howard Eugene Oleary (no apostrophe) was formally pronounced dead at a Los Angeles residence.
He was cremated on July 5 of that year.
It took until September 22, 2023, for results from a tox screening to come back, at which time the L.A. County’s deputy medical examiner ruled the manner of death to be accidental, and the cause to be cocaine toxicity.
Oleary’s death was unceremoniously reported via a blurb on Hollywood L.A. News, which guessed, “We’re assuming he’s of Irish descent and that his proper family name is O’Leary.”
It was an ignominious end for a straight-identified man who had, for a few years from about 1977 to about 1984, been one of the most vivacious faces of lust in the worlds of gay and straight porn.
So, how did famous sex star Johnny Harden wind up dying almost three years ago without anybody noticing?
A Star Is Born
There was a time when porn stars truly were stars.
Now, anyone with a phone can become an internationally known sex symbol, but back in 1977, when 21-year-old Howard O’Leary made his debut in an X-rated short called Moving Parts, the idea that he might soon become a gay-household name probably did not occur to him. Not only were sex stars rarely famous at that point, his first work was in straight movies.
Still, even when he was banging girls, he exploded with ropes of star quality that gay fans could not help noticing.
Brace yourself, because gay men are very good at nearly mythologizing sex acts and sexy actors, at fondly recalling our absolute favorites in unabashedly purple prose. Bearing that in mind, Howard — who went by the on-the-nose moniker “Johnny Harden” when selling his image to guys and by the equally literal “Gene Carrier” when appealing to women — truly was a filmic god. The total package, including having one of porn’s biggest packages, he really seemed as if he had sprung from the collective gay imagination.
Straight porn simply wasn’t big enough to contain him.
Following the money by entering the queer arena, Harden stood out from the pack of men who got in on the ground floor of XXX right as VCRs made porn as easily available as a quart of milk, not only thanks to his double-take equipment — he also had fashion-model looks, huge eggs, a killer pre-BBL ass, a merciless tan line and, more than all of that, gave feverish performances. All those other porn guys were just as young and sexy, but Johnny and the camera were obsessed with each other.
An instant star with gay studios Colt and Falcon, he never phoned in a performance, captivating with passionate self-sucks, a neat trick that would have been wasted on the straight audience. But he was his own best co-star, so while Johnny alone was a 21-gun salute, Johnny with another guy was more of a shotgun wedding.
Even though his interactions with other men went no further than some near-miss receptive oral (he did once bite a guy’s butt tentatively to show he was good people), he was still an in-demand model in the gay market.
Falcon photographer Fred Bisonnes says Harden during this period was hard to work with, in part because he couldn’t get it up. Harden was a natural for a gay audience, but he wasn’t gay himself and couldn’t perform on cue, which is probably why he only appeared in a handful of gay films — and never offered full sex in them.
But when he was on, he was on.
In Johnny Harden and the Champs (1978), Johnny struts into frame with supreme confidence in his tennis togs, strips while making eye contact and plays with himself, all the while exuding a kind of hedonistic rapture akin to Marilyn Monroe getting her skirt blown up in The Seven Year Itch (1955). All alone, he’s clearly as thrilled to be spending time with THE Johnny Harden as we all were when we first saw the film.
In fact, he literally fucks himself in that film, the forever-perfect union of a star and his biggest fan.
In other films, like Johnny Harden and Friends (1980), he consented to some frottage and mutual masturbation, but he was still trading on being trade. Though he couldn’t get it up reliably, there was a porn premium placed on straight men who acted as if they could be … persuaded. A classic porn trope, he worked it effortlessly, suggesting he would have been hard to beat as a gay-baiting Instagram stud had he been born 45 years later.
Of course, as out of his element as he was around other dicks, he loved women, and he went much further in straight porn, as in Diamond Collection classics like Western Sailor (1981), in which he borrows an outfit from the Cracker Jack mascot to perform cunnilingus on a sleeping nympho. “There’s nothin’ like eatin’ a girl out when she doesn’t know it,” his character observes.
We said it was a different time, we never implied it was always better.
With women, Harden did full penetration, and in one scene even dressed in drag as part of a storyline in which his character was pulling a Some Like It Hot to get closer to a smokin’ girl.
The unusual thing about Harden’s straight work is it had considerable gay crossover appeal, and not because of the drag. Some of his early films for Diamond Collection were shot like today’s Straight Guys for Gay Eyes films — porn featuring straight couples in which the camera lingers on every nook and cranny of the men.
He couldn’t help it if he was prettier than most of his leading ladies.
In spite of making some potent appearances, he might have vanished in the collective queer imagination were it not for his prowess as a print model. As electrifying as his video work was, whether alone or with a lucky girl and her underpaid jaw, Harden really came alive on the covers of gay smut mags, including some devoted entirely to him. The magazine version of Johnny Harden and Friends changes hands for $100, even in the 2025 economy. The Big Beautiful Bill has nothing on Johnny’s Big Beautiful Drill.
After planting a rumor that Johnny Harden had died in a car crash and assuming the persona of Gene Carrier, our anti-hero became a legit model for a spell, including — reportedly — for Dior, Gaultier, Mugler and others. He probably hoped to do more of that, but his image in porn blew up and may have hindered him in that regard. It’s hard to say, as he did model successfully for several years after leaving the industry — including for the esteemed First Models and Ford.
If porn did hold him back (his reported height of 5’8” could not have helped either), it’s a shame, because whether oozing pretty-boy heterosexuality as Playgirl’s Man for September 1980 for photographer Suze Randall or serving as an extra-handsome mannequin in ads hawking menswear, he knew how to sell stuff with his eyes.
He clearly could make the fashions of the nine-teen-eigh-eigh-ties look good, but he still had the air of a man whose clothes would look better on the floor.