Segal took the criticisms from the radical groups in stride. Jokingly acknowledging himself as "an unregenerate heterosexual," he continued to insist that such a condition did not "prevent him from having an insight into the natures of my gay friends."

Segal, who was born on November 26, 1924 in New York City, was actually an obvious choice to design a monument to gay liberation. By the time of the commission, he had become America's leading sculptor of public monuments and memorials. Besides, as Voeller remarked at one meeting, all the gay and lesbian artists of comparable stature, most of them deeply closeted, had turned down the commission.

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Moreover, Segal had already demonstrated an unusual sensitivity in the depiction of lesbian couples in works such as "Lovers on a Bed I" (1976) and "The Girl Friends" (1969).

Segal was educated at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, New York University, and Rutgers University. He earned an early reputation as a painter, but in the 1960s he turned to sculpture, using plaster casts of individuals--often friends and neighbors--to create life-like mannequins.

Associated with the pop artists of the 1960s, he created sculptures of ordinary people placed in everyday environments. His works are familiar in their subject matter and form, yet haunting in their ghostly stillness. In installations such as "The Subway" (1968) or "The Diner" (1964-1968) or "Walk, Don't Walk" (1976), he manages to convey interior feelings of loneliness and isolation, while also discovering the miracles of daily life.

Early in his career Segal avoided bronze, believing that it was too inert to achieve the expressive quality he sought. However, in 1971, with The Dancers, he developed a technique known as double-casting that used both plaster and bronze. In this technique, molten metal is poured into the interior of a plaster cast, reproducing in great detail the texture of skin and clothing. Using double-casting, he was able to create realistic, life-like figures that were also durable enough to function as permanent, outdoor, public art.

As a result of this process, "Gay Liberation" is at once literally "monumental" and intimate. It captures the ordinariness of the human interaction between the lovers, yet it also freezes the interaction in time and space and art. Hence, the sculpture underlines its important point about the humanity of the lovers, yet it does so simply and naturally by means of the intimacy it both captures and replicates.

Among Segal's other monuments are "In Memory of May 4, 1970: Abraham and Isaac" (1978), a memorial of the Kent State University slayings; the San Francisco Holocaust Memorial (1983); and sculptures for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D. C. (1997).

Segal died from complications of cancer on June 9, 2000.

Patronage--the sponsorship of artists and the commissioning of works from them--has remained a significant factor in the creation of queer visual culture in the modern era.

An early 1960s school of painting and sculpture that utilized the subjects, techniques, or stylistic conventions of popular culture, Pop Art expressed a camp sensibility.

Amsterdam's Homomonument is one of the world's foremost public memorials acknowledging the persecution endured by gay men and lesbians during World War II and throughout history.

American activist and scientist Bruce Voeller was a leader in both the gay rights movement and the fight against AIDS.