“I am the love that dare not speak its name,” Lord Alfred Douglas wrote as the closing verse of his 1892 poem Two Loves, coyly toying with the taboo against homosexuality in fin de siècle London that would land this poem as evidence in the 1895 gross indecency trial against his lover, the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde. Wilde subsequently lost the trial, his freedom, health, and ultimately his life.
More than a century later, queer love and desire is no less political. As LGBTQ rights, programs, and services are systematically dismantled across the United States, elevating queer voices becomes an act of resistance and a call to the community to stand against the rising tide of fascism.
It’s a position photographer, poet, and journalist Slava Mogutin understands better than most. Hailing from Siberia, Mogutin rose to prominence in post-Perestroika Russia as the only openly gay member of the media. Using his platform to challenge homophobia, Mogutin became the subject of two highly publicized criminal cases on charges of “malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and extreme insolence.”
After attempting to officially register the first same-sex marriage in Russia with his then partner, American artist Robert Filippini, Mogutin was forced to flee in 1995. At the age of 21, he became the first Russian to be granted political asylum in the United States on the grounds of homophobic persecution.
Over the past three decades, Mogutin has become the preeminent voice of a new generation of queer artists who have laid desire bare, toying with the porous boundaries of art, photography, fashion, and pornography with an intoxicating blend of mischief, insouciance, rebellion, and edge.
But contained within the gritty glamour lay something more: the seeds of romanticism which Mogutin explores in “My Romantic Ideal,” a new exhibition of nearly 100 by 28 photographers from 14 countries including Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Tom Bianchi, Bruce LaBruce, Quil Lemons, Benjamin Fredrickson, and Stanley Stellar for an intergenerational portrait of queer love and desire.
Flower of Love
With “My Romantic Ideal,” Slava Mogutin shares a softer side, one that has been hiding in plain sight amidst the raucous cacophony of his earlier, delectably aggressive scenes of power, strength, subversion, and lust.
“I”m not a stranger to controversy and explicit imagery but I set this idea in mind of doing a project that is different from anything I have done as an artist or curator,” Mogutin says. “I came up with the title ‘My Romantic Ideal’ because I felt like we need to step back and do something reflective. “You can only create more aggression with aggression. We’re in desperate need of compassion and imagery that is not necessarily defiant or provoking, but just defiance through beauty, poetry, and romanticism.”
With “My Romantic Ideal,” Mogutin weaves together luminous scenes of innocence and promise, trust and intimacy, care and consideration, admiration and curiosity. Here the body is restored to the utopian possibilities of Edenic bliss, where we are more the better for having experienced it.
“I have been censored continuously throughout my life and career in Russia, the US, and many other places where I’ve shown my work,” Mogutin says. “Institutional support for queer art is shrinking, and there is a need for independent, community based spaces like the Bureau. This is my third exhibition with them, and they didn’t impose any restrictions. That was the most important part for me.”
“My Romantic Ideal” is on view through August 31, 2025, at The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division in New York.
