When artist Amy Sherald canceled her LGBTQ-inclusive Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery show “American Sublime” last month, it was just the latest in a series of censorship episodes involving LGBTQ art at major American museums this year.

In February, Washington, D.C.’s Art Museum of the Americas canceled “Nature’s Wild With Andil Gosine” just weeks before the exhibition’s scheduled opening in March, without saying why. The group show was to have included works inspired by Gosine’s 2021 book, “Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean,” which reflects on art, activism and homosexuality in the region.

The same month, Arizona’s Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art made eleventh-hour edits to a traveling exhibition of women, queer and trans artists, which had previously been called “transfeminisms,” altering the title of its condensed show to “There are other skies.”

In April, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art postponed a group exhibition of works by LGBTQ African artists titled “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art,” which had been scheduled for a late May opening to coincide with WorldPride. The D.C. museum cited budgetary reasons for postponing the show to 2026, but the timing was hard to miss on the heels of Trump administration directives to the Smithsonian to remove “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from its museums — as well as the forced and pre-emptive relocation of other WorldPride cultural events after Trump administration firings at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

“There’s something about the combination of art and sexuality that still remains the third rail in the American museum world,” art historian Jonathan D. Katz told NBC News. Katz was the lead curator for “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” the vast and successful historical survey of LGBTQ art that ran through early July at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 Gallery.

Katz traces the roots of modern queer art censorship to the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition “The Perfect Moment,” which — with its provocative imagery, much of it homoerotic — became a cultural lightning rod at the height of the Reagan/Bush-era culture wars in 1989-90.

“You’d think that decades later, this would no longer be a live wire, but it still seems to be,” Katz said.

Central to the cancellation of Sherald’s show was her painting “Trans Forming Liberty,” which features a Black trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty. After she learned that the National Portrait Gallery had “internal concerns” about the painting and planned to replace or supplement it with a video to provide “both sides” of its trans subject matter, Sherald balked and canceled her entire show, which would have been the museum’s first solo exhibition by a Black contemporary artist.

“While no single person is to blame, it’s clear that institutional fear shaped by a broader climate of political hostility toward trans lives played a role,” Sherald, who rose to fame when she painted former first lady Michelle Obama’s official portrait, said in a statement after the cancellation. “At a time when transgender people are being legislated against, silenced, and endangered across our nation, silence is not an option.”

After the cancellation, a spokesperson for the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees the gallery, disputed Sherald’s claims and said that the institution wanted more time to better contextualize the painting but that Sherald canceled before that could be done.

Katz said Sherald’s withdrawal of the exhibit “is what this moment requires.”

“I bow to her,” he said. “She’s willing to do it, she’s got the strength to do it, and I think it’s extraordinary.”

The National Portrait Gallery is one of eight Smithsonian museums targeted as part of the first phase of an expansive review announced by the Trump administration on Tuesday. The review will analyze all aspects of current and future museum exhibitions to ensure alignment with the president’s March executive order calling for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

In June, across town from “The First Homosexuals,” the Art Institute of Chicago opened a traveling exhibition of 19th century French artist Gustave Caillebotte’s male-focused and arguably homoerotic work, changing the show’s name from “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men” to “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World.” Wall texts accompanying the artworks at the Art Institute take a more general approach than they had at the exhibition’s previous incarnations at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where frank discussions of gender and sexuality were included.

“That one was particularly galling, because not only did the show coincide with my show, but I wrote for the catalog of that exhibition precisely how one talks about same-sex desire in Caillebotte’s work,” Katz said.

Katz’s associate curator for “The First Homosexuals,” Johnny Willis, added, “We’re not asking them to say that Gustave Caillebotte was gay … We’re asking them to leave open the possibility, and to foreground the blurriness of these questions in the late 19th century.”

In a statement to NBC News, the Art Institute of Chicago said its “Painting His World” title is more illustrative of what people will see when they come to the exhibition, which “reflects Caillebotte’s full lived experience and daily life, including his personal relationships with the men in his life, like his brother, colleagues, and friends.” The institute added that it’s “common practice” for the same exhibition to have differing titles and wall labels when it’s at different museums.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art — which was not included in the Trump administration’s Phase I review — said in a statement on Tuesday that the postponement of its LGBTQ exhibition was due to private funding challenges and that pushing it back to early 2026 “provide the museum additional time to increase fundraising for the exhibit.”

The Art Museum of the Americas and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art did not immediately respond to NBC News’ requests for comment regarding their canceled and altered exhibits.

Willis said that a “particular strain of ‘1 Percent’ conservatism” is running some American museums today and that it is contributing to a rise in censorship.

“A lot of these museums are privately funded,” Willis said. “So I think it’s about trying to pacify a class of oligarchs that by and large run these museums, for whom questions of explicit uncensored sexuality are frankly anathema to their values.”

Fortunately for Katz and Willis — and Chicago audiences — the innovative exhibition space Wrightwood 659, just seven years old and committed to presenting socially engaged art, stepped up to host “The First Homosexuals” when virtually every other American museum turned it down.

“One museum director said to me, ‘It’s precisely the exhibition I’d like to show, and therefore the one that I can’t,’” Katz said.

After the show’s success, Katz said, he was sure that several museums that had turned it down would ask to host it next. “Never happened,” he said. “Rave reviews, the last two months were sold out, waiting lists of 100-plus people — I mean, everything a museum could want, and yet no.”

Instead, the exhibition will travel next to Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Basel, where it will open in the spring.

For now, queer art is still finding a home at some major American museums. “Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors” runs through this weekend at the Denver Art Museum; New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is showcasing “Casa Susanna” through Jan. 25; and in Los Angeles, the Getty Center has a double feature of queer shows, “Queer Lens: A History of Photography” and $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives, both on view through Sept. 28.

“These exhibitions do what we always hope an exhibition will do — bring visibility to lesser-known histories through the display of art to the public,” said Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The Denver Art Museum’s Native Arts curator, John P. Lukavic, said editing the exhibition was never a consideration for the museum, having worked with Monkman, a queer, Two-Spirit artist, for more than a dozen years. “Presenting his work and the queer themes he explores are completely normal for us and our community,” Lukavic said.

Willis said museum officials underestimate the public’s appetite for queer-themed shows.

“I don’t think a lot of these museum officials realize how much of a gold mine this is,” Willis said. “There is enormous hunger for these histories, these stories, these narratives right now — not to mention that it can bolster a reputation. You can mark yourself as an institution that upholds bravery.”