Red scare: years after his arrest for spreading "propaganda of sexual perversions," out photographer Slava Mogutin returns to his native Russia to shoot Lost Boys, a voyeuristic tour of young men on the margins of Russian society.

Slava Mogutin is surrounded by contradictions. Known mainly as a writer in his native Russia--as a pop culture journalist, poet, and respected translator of Baldwin and Burroughs--he has gained acclaim in the United States as a photographer whose work confronts raw male eroticism head-on. Though he's an avowed exhibitionist, having performed in X-rated scenes in Bruce La Bruce's Skin Flick (a.k.a. Skin Gang), Mogutin is nonetheless a reticent public figure, consenting to be interviewed only via e-mail. To Mogutin, though, it is not he who embodies contradiction but the times in which he lives. 'Today, real sensuality and sexuality have been replaced by dumb violence and plastic surrogates," says the 32-year-old New York City transplant, whose first monograph, Lost Boys, is being released by PowerHouse Books in November. "To me, contemporary fashion and porn are equally fake."

Born in 1974 in Russia's Siberia region, Mogutin moved to Moscow as a teen. There his edgy, graphic writing afforded him a certain notoriety on the talk show circuit but made him a target of the Yeltsin regime, which balked at his dissident antics, like trying to marry his American boyfriend at the Wedding Palace in 1994. By age 21, Mogutin had been brought up on strongly worded charges like "malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism" and "propaganda of sexual perversions." After three years of what amounted to house retest, he sought political asylum in the United States. Thanks to the efforts of groups like Amnesty International and the PEN American Center, his petition was granted, making him the first Russian given asylum in the United States based on antigay persecution.

Still, the transition was not easy for the young emigre. "I lost everything all at once--my language, my family and friends, my audience," says Mogutin. "I had to reinvent myself from the ground up."

After arriving in Manhattan in 1995, Mogutin spent his first few years learning English, working on assignments for Russian magazines, and trying to establish a new circle of friends. He also rekindled a longtime interest in photography, apprenticing with celebrated photographers like Arthur Tress and Terry Richardson and making important connections in the New York City cultural scene. "It was the best learning experience for me," he says. "I realized it doesn't take expensive equipment and a professional studio to take great photos. It gave me confidence in my own work and vision." Mogutin still uses point-and-shoot and disposable cameras almost exclusively. His DIY aesthetic has graced gallery walls in the United States, Europe, and Australia as well as magazine pages as varied as BlackBook, Stern, i-D, and Honcho.

His new book, Lost Boys, is a photographic menagerie of young male archetypes from both the Old World and New: Russian street hustlers and soldiers, German skinheads, Toronto punks, New York City bondage fetishists. Selected mostly from two of Mogutin's solo exhibitions--"Lost Boys" (2003) and "No Love" (2004)--the book's images are charged both erotically and sociologically. "Adolescent sexuality has always been one of the main subjects of my work," Mogutin reveals, "as have urban male subcultures--young men creating their own identities on the outskirts of corporate consumerist societies."

Most of the photos that make up Lost Boys depict young men in vulnerable yet transgressive situations--sniffing another guy's underarm, standing naked at a window, being penetrated by a beer bottle--scenarios that Mogutin calls engaging and beautiful. "I've always enjoyed breaking taboos and stereotypes--I don't need anyone's moral approval."

Lost Boys would not have been possible without Mogutin's return to his homeland, after Vladimir Putin took office in 2000 and charges against Mogutin were dropped. A year later he won Russia's prestigious literary award, the Andrei Bely Prize. Mogutin believes that while the status of Russian gays and lesbians has improved since his flight, being out is still not an easy proposition. "Today's Russia is a corrupt dictatorship masquerading as a free society. The country remains totally homophobic," he says, citing as an example the attacks at the Moscow gay pride parade in May. At the same time, there's an almost playful air evident in Lost Boys, a deliberate attempt by Mogutin to show what he calls "a different Russia--one that is colorful, sexy, and full of crazy energy that you don't see anywhere else." He says of Russia, "You find the most amazing faces there, with beautiful smiles, rosy cheeks, and bright blue eyes." For all its unbridled "kink," Lost Boys, with its cherubic athletes, drunken party boys, and posturing cadets, has an innocent side.

British writer Dominic Johnson, who contributed one of the essays accompanying Lost Boys, gets the contradictions right when he describes Mogutin as "radically" modern yet aligned with the sexual sophistication of an earlier time--a modern-day Jean Genet, as it were. "Slava is incredibly cultured--he's a queer aesthete who's been drenched in the counterculture since his teenage years," says Johnson. "His pictures trouble our ways of thinking of belonging to a larger gay community or safely understanding sexual identity."

Avery is currently the Around Town editor for Time Out New York. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Maxim, Out, Cargo, and HX.