Nearly queerly: the life and death of a queer health advisory committee.

This paper examines how a group of grassroots activists successfully lobbied for the creation of a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons' population health advisory committee members balanced the at time conflicting interests of an institutional structure (the public health system) with those communities historically marginal to such institutions. The specific achievements and challenges of the committee and its members during its four-year life span, 1997-2001, are discussed, including their ramifications in other contexts.