Slava Mogutin, NYC GO-GO 2.0
Where performance is involved, there’s always an element of illusion. The go-go dancers who perform in New York’s gay clubs are fantasy technicians – maybe they’re manufacturing our fantasy, maybe their own (maybe both). For artist and provocateur Bruce LaBruce, the archetypal New York go-go boy represents a potent mix of intriguing associations – a “sexual object, exhibitionist, narcissist, hustler, performance artist and working stiff (so to speak)”.
Photographer Slava Mogutin, who has trained his lens on gay nightlife for more than two decades, began taking pictures of New York’s go-go boys 20 years ago when his boyfriend was working as a bartender-cum-dancer. Looking beyond the stage performance and the illusion, many of his portraits were taken while spending time backstage. “I always carried my camera around, so naturally I started photographing what was happening around me. It was straightforward documentary photography, not an art project. No styling, no posing, no lighting, no props, no hair or makeup,” he recalls. He was driven by the desire to simply “live in the moment” and make friends; he wasn’t contemplating making a project of them, but it evolved out of “familiarity, trust and respect”.
This evolved into the photo book NYC GO-GO, an ode to the dancers and their world. Two decades later, the photographs are on display in the exhibition NYC GO-GO 2.0, featuring over 60 never-before-seen photographs and accompanied by a limited-edition book with a new essay by Bruce LaBruce. The term “go-go” derives from the French à gogo, meaning “in abundance” and, as LaBruce adds, NYC Go-Go is an abundance of “pornography, portraiture, anthropology, nostalgia and social history all rolled into one sweaty, ample basket”.
“New York attracts all sorts of people who don’t quite fit anywhere else, and these places were full of them,” Mogutin tells Dazed. “There were aspiring dancers, artists, hustlers, neighbourhood freaks, and guys who were just trying to make rent. Some were shameless attention seekers; others were almost painfully shy and introverted offstage. A few were surprisingly entrepreneurial about the whole thing. You’d meet someone who could barely afford dinner but knew exactly how to work a room. I was always fascinated by these contradictions. Nobody was just one thing, and the best characters were usually the ones who refused to be easily understood or labelled.”
“Some of the best pictures were taken backstage,” he says, recalling scenes the average club-goer would never get to witness. “Guys doing what they had to do to get ready for a show: ‘gay for pay’ dancers masturbating to straight porn or tying their balls with rubber bands to get an erection before going onstage. Some even brought their girlfriends, who collected their hard-earned tips after every set. Gay guys flirting and blowing each other. Everyone sharing the same rooms, drugs, and clientele.”
Rather than dismantling the fantasy they projected, seeing the dancers’ behind-the-scenes world and the preparation involved added a layer of additional allure for the photographer. “Sometimes the sexiest guy in the room was also the most awkward and insecure person backstage. I always enjoyed that disconnect,” he says. “The stage creates a character, but it doesn’t erase the person. I wasn’t interested in manufacturing some behind-the-scenes fairy tale. The reality was often funnier, messier, more mundane and more revealing than anything happening under the lights.”
NYC Go-Go documents a pre-smartphone world when the internet was in its infancy. “I’m not interested in romanticising the past. There was plenty of exploitation, criminality, infighting and political bullshit back then, too,” he says. “But revisiting these photographs reminded me of the beauty of being physically present in the world, without documenting every moment for an audience or an algorithm. You went out, met strangers, got into trouble, and sometimes something unexpected and magical happened. You couldn’t manufacture that kind of experience on demand.”
For Mogutin, looking at these pictures again feels like “opening a time capsule from another life”. The scope and pace of modernity often produces the feeling of having missed out on a halcyon age. But even then, Mogutin was mourning the changing city. “Everything was getting more expensive, and the city was waging a war on nightlife and the gay scene – the two things that made New York so unique. Mayor Giuliani’s quality-of-life crusade helped create an atmosphere in which anything underground, countercultural, or anti-establishment was treated as a problem to be managed. Independent bars struggled, rents went up, and the culture that depended on those spaces became harder to sustain. Of course, New York has always reinvented itself, but the transformation started to feel more like a corporate takeover. The city was gradually losing the very things that made people want to live there in the first place,” he says. “First they kill the party, then they sell you a sanitised, overpriced version of it.”
Still, this isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. Mogutin is less interested in reminiscing than he is in discovering what these images still reveal today. And he realised that some things remain the same, regardless. “The technology has changed,” he says, “but the basic ingredients haven't: sex, money, ego, desire, and the eternal human need to be seen.”
NYC GO-GO 2.0 is on show in a 20th-anniversary exhibition at SoHo Project Space, running until 1 November, 2026.