Tonight and tomorrow, you are invited to a symposium. It costs almost nothing except your time, and though it is called Queering the Art Museum, it is not only for those who identify as queer—although the open discussion of sexual difference is a vital part of what needs to happen in museums.

It is about changing the culture of museums so that they no longer defer to the conservatism of a certain segment of the rich and powerful, but serve a broader public interest instead.

Basically, Queering the Art Museum is Occupy Art Museums under another name.

Hide/Seek co-curator Jonathan Katz gave a rousing talk this morning at Sandra Jackson-Dumont's museology class at the University of Washington, Public Engagement in Art. It served as an unofficial rallying cry to open the weekend of events.

"Museum directors are much more concerned about what might scare or offend a trustee than they are about what might scare or offend the public," Katz said. "I take the romantic ideal of museums as an institution for the public to be little more than a fiction at this point."

What Katz found most objectionable after hate group the Catholic League protested Hide/Seek in late 2010 was not the Smithsonian's own censorship of the show, but other museums' accusation that the Smithsonian was cowardly—when many of those institutions had refused to lend artworks to Hide/Seek in the first place.

For instance, Hide/Seek was conceived and titled with this 1948 painting by Pavel Tchelitchew in mind. The painting is owned by the Museum of Modern Art, but MoMA refused to lend it, Katz said.

Here in Seattle, "Locally, [museum] trustees were approached for donations to Hide/Seek and aggressively refused," Katz said.

(Don't believe it? Queering the Art Museum organizer Erin Bailey is working on curating a queer exhibition for Seattle's Museum of History and Industry. When it opens in October 2013, it will be the first of its kind at the institution and, she says, the first explicitly queer museum show in Seattle in 18 years.)

Katz called out the authors and editors of major new catalogs for leaving out crucial queer scholarship on artists ranging from Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly to Agnes Martin and Robert Rauschenberg. Last month, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced it will publish a Getty-funded online catalog devoted to Rauschenberg. But Katz says the lineup of 20 of the world's leading writers on Rauschenberg does not include a single scholar who focuses on sexuality, effectively erasing Rauschenberg's queerness from what SFMOMA deems important about him.

Sure, the Smithsonian censored Hide/Seek when it removed the video by David Wojnarowicz that the Catholic League screamed about. But it was the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery—a public museum, unlike almost every other museum in this country—did organize Hide/Seek.

"As aggressively difficult as the federal government is, it's less difficult than the private American museum world," Katz said. "International banking, Hollywood, television—they're all more progressive than the American museum world."

Museums get a pass for being progressive because they sometimes present challenging work, he points out, but it's most often formally, not socially, challenging. Exhibitions by queer or socially marginalized figures are tokenized—or those aspects of artists' identities are quieted. Docents at the Whitney Museum of American Art during a Cy Twombly exhibition a decade ago were told to cast suspicion on any museumgoer who asked about Twombly's gayness, Katz said, according to a memo that was leaked to him from the Whitney's education department. The docents were told to respond, "Why would you ask that?" and "Do you think that's relevant to the paintings we're looking at here?"

For all Katz's brilliance and passion—and his just plain being right in many ways—he got brilliant and passionate (and also right) pushback especially from Jackson-Dumont, who is Seattle Art Museum's education director (formerly of the Studio Museum of Harlem), and Erin Langner, also a SAM educator (and formerly of the Henry).

"Did you have any artists who wouldn't lend their work to Hide/Seek?" Jackson-Dumont asked.

"Yes," Katz admitted.

"How come you didn't talk about them?" she continued.

His explanation was good, but so was the question. Katz maintained that while the artists might be acting as what he'd call "hypocritical," they also come from "the best of intentions" and "plus, I'm hoping to get them to play ball in the future," he said, smiling.

Langner and Jackson-Dumont asked about the role of the education department, since Katz seemed to focus more on what Jackson-Dumont called out as the traditionally "seminal" but extremely limited space of the gallery walls. If education and curatorial departments remain, as they are now, separated and divided hierarchically (curatorial seen as more important than education), then how can museums synthesize efforts to do more than just a gay film series, a gay cocktails-at-the-museum night, or a token exhibition?

"This is where you start to understand the subjective role that museums play in how the art is represented," Jackson-Dumont said to her students.

When Katz announced that his responsibility "isn't to the artist, it's to the public and the work of art," Jackson-Dumont responded, "So the artist becomes mute in a museum space?"

Katz parried again. "It's not just that I feel a responsibility to the public, it's that I feel a responsibility especially to those members of the public who have been disenfranchised. What does it say to a 16-year-old lesbian in Oklahoma that her experience is not represented on the walls?"

In some ways, this is First World Problems 101. But in other ways, the image of the American museum world as progressive and risktaking when really it is in thrall to as much or more self-preserving, crony conservatism as any other sphere of American culture needs correcting.

Henry Art Gallery spokeswoman Betsey Brock asked Katz for tips on how to develop more socially conscious boards of trustees?

"It is a disservice," he said, "to pay attention to historic wealth. Museums follow the path of least resistance. They know the X family so they go to the X family, even when the X family is not where it's at." He encouraged museums to look outside a social class that "sees its privileges ebbing and therefore is hooked on the persistence of its privileges."

(If you're out there, you're wealthy, and you care about any of this and want to get involved, email Brock. The Henry is the contemporary art museum of Seattle.)

Oh, and don't forget: Neither Seattle Art Museum nor the Henry Art Gallery took Hide/Seek. Tacoma Art Museum did. If you want to do something good and something rewarding, pay TAM a visit and see the show before it closes on June 10.