Here's a question for local museum curators and directors: Why isn't Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture coming to Houston?

David Wojnarowicz: A Fire In My Belly (still), 1986-87. Super 8mm film, black and white and color. Silent. Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collections/New York University

The exhibit, which explored how homoeroticism and social marginalization shaped modern American portraiture, appeared at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. last year. It won the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics' award for best thematic show of 2010.

It also won unwanted attention from government censors. Smithsonian Institution secretary G. Wayne Clough removed a four-minute excerpt from the late David Wojnarowicz' 1987 video A Fire in My Belly from the show after then-House-Speaker-designate John Boehner (R-Ohio) and incoming Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) called for the show's cancellation and threatened "tough scrutiny beginning in January when the new majority in the House moves (in)."

The resulting furor got many more eyeballs viewing Wojnarowicz' piece than would have otherwise. Museums around the country, including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, held screenings and panel discussions of the video in protest and solidarity. (CAMH's screening was co-presented by the Glassell School of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Station Museum of Contemporary Art curators participated in the panel discussion.)

But what about the exhibit as a whole, which includes works by Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Catherine Opie, among others? Two museums -- the Brooklyn Museum and Washington state's Tacoma Art Museum -- have stepped up to present uncensored versions of the show.

Why hasn't a museum in Houston, the largest American city with an openly gay mayor, joined their ranks? Presenting an uncensored Hide/Seek seems like a natural opportunity for collaboration between the Menil Collection, for whom connections between art and activism are integral to its heritage; the MFAH, most of whose collection comes from the period covered in Hide/Seek and which is a frequent collaborator with the Brooklyn Museum; the Station, which mounted Because We Are, a terrific LGBT group show last year; the Blaffer Art Museum, which counts a community of scholars as its core audience; and CAMH, which has an openly gay director and counts "reclamation projects" -- exhibits devoted to chapters of contemporary art history that would otherwise go erased -- among its most important shows.

See Hide/Seek co-curator Jonathan Katz's interview with the Stranger's Jen Graves for insights into how art history and scholarship can run afoul of the institutions who are supposed to safeguard and promote it.

After reading Graves' piece I called Katz. He said the controversy prompted by museums' taking or not taking Hide/Seek "shows how incredibly fraught this subject and representation remains."

He said he's come to realize that because the art market is so prohibitively expensive, museums are increasingly dependent on what their trustees will put in their legacies, putting "a powerful lock on curators for decades into the future" and preempting risky projects. Katz has run up against this issue a lot over the years while shopping around gay-themed shows. (The Tacoma Art Museum, a rare exception, will also present his next project, Art, AIDS, America.)

As for whether there's still time for Houston museums to mount an effort to extend the Hide/Seek tour -- the Brooklyn presentation runs Nov. 18-Feb. 12; Tacoma mounts the show March 17-June 12 -- Katz thinks it's worth a try and says he'd love to see the show come to Texas.

So do I. Surely one or more of our leading museums can find a way to make it happen, bringing Houston an art show that couldn't resonate more loudly with the civil-rights issue of our time. Both the MFAH and CAMH currently have solo exhibitions of work by openly gay artists -- Charles LeDray and Marc Swanson, respectively -- but group shows like Hide/Seek are exceedingly rare, to the point that the chance to see them really does constitute -- to borrow an overused phrase -- a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Museums are always looking for ways to stay relevant. Here's a golden opportunity.