The untold story in the AIDS crisis is that of the mobilization of the gay community. Bearing Witness is a study of how a community-based initiative - Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York - overcame the formidable obstacles of homophobia and fear of AIDS, and the resulting lack of an adequate response from political and health organizations. Philip Kayal shows how volunteers at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) confront their deepest fears about being homosexual. Rather than shun People with AIDS, they identify with them and neutralize the immobilizing power of homophobia. The volunteers have the courage to bear witness to the suffering of People with AIDS, suffering that in many ways is their own.

Kayal explores the why and how of the gay community response to AIDS from his perspective as both a sociologist and GMHC volunteer. The author's own experience allows him to illuminate the social and political meanings of volunteerism by showing how gay/AIDS volunteerism is radical political and religious work. Through collective altruism, GMHC helps to integrate the gay community and establish new concepts of what is sacred. In Bearing Witness, Kayal explores the relationship between personal motives for volunteering and the broader political, social, and religious contexts in which People with AIDS have been largely abandoned. He shows how the mixing of morals, medicine, and American volunteer ideology sets both the tone of the politics of AIDS and influences the evolution of volunteer organizations such as GMHC. AIDS brings that which is deeply private into the public domain, and Kayal offers a compelling analysis of this intersection in his new study of gay/AIDS volunteerism.