Abstract
This essay accounts for the shifting historical frames that infl ect the meaning of George Segal’s Gay Liberation (1980–92) over time. Public art is suited for temporal exegesis to the extent that it is made to endure even as the population that encounters it changes, and it demonstrates the inability of the artist or commissioning body to control art’s reception. Read temporally, Gay Liberation marks three defi ning moments in the complex, dynamic articulation of gay and lesbian, and later queer, politics: the Stonewall riots and the political organizations that mobilized immediately afterwards; the claiming of public gay and lesbian identities and the active articulation of gay and lesbian cultures in the decade post-Stonewall; and the AIDS epidemic and the related emergence of queer politics. Despite its restrained realist style, Gay Liberation, with its sedimented meanings, is a reminder that a radical rethinking of gender and sexuality has been and can be imagined.
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