The Making of George Segal's Gay Liberation.(ART MEMO)

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, on June 23, 1992, sculptor George Segal (1924-2000) witnessed the installation of his first outdoor public sculpture in Manhattan, the city center that had inspired much of his work and had made him internationally famous. Titled Gay Liberation, the piece had taken twelve years to find its intended home within the triangle of Christopher Park in Greenwich Village, just across Christopher Street from what had been the Stonewall Inn.

Cast in white bronze, the standing gay male couple and their lesbian counterparts, who were seated on two park benches included in the composition, managed to ruffle feathers of every stripe. The proposed public sculpture had been announced in The New York Times on July 21,1979, with nary a response pro or con. But in the following months, as the maze of community and city approvals began to be negotiated, opinions grew increasingly polarized and loud.

Protesting gays thought it wrong because only white models in their early thirties had been employed, and the white (albeit Jewish) artist was straight (though the models were all openly gay). Others felt, according to a flier distributed in the West Village, that "such a memorial is premature in that our battles are not yet won and that liberation has only just begun." Why hadn't the GLBT community been involved or consulted? Why hadn't a gay or lesbian artist been enlisted? Many non-gay critics didn't want a public space to be occupied by a sculpture that alluded to homosexuality, much less a depiction of same-sex couples, while fully clothed, actually touching one another. For those detractors, it was bad enough that actual homosexuals roamed the West Village streets.

Despite all the brouhaha, Gay Liberation was eventually installed as a permanent ...