A survivor from Texas speaks about his harrowing experience, his uncertain road to recovery, and his mission to save others from the predatory trap that ensnared him
As a kid growing up in the small Texas town of Navasota, Jose Alfaro spent his summers playing in the pastures and creeks near his home, examining bugs and frogs, crawfish and turtles. “It was one of those towns where tractors hold up traffic,” he says. Trains slowed things down, too, rumbling by on historic tracks that crossed the downtown streets.
Life at home was less peaceful. His parents, high school sweethearts who wound up raising three kids in their early twenties, worked long hours — his dad at a metal-parts company, his mom at a hair salon. The family was poor, but Alfaro didn’t realize it at the time. He just knew that when his father came home, he was often angry and exasperated, ruling the house by fear.
One thing that riled his father: Alfaro’s interest in dolls. “I loved playing with Barbies,” he says. “My father knew how feminine I was, and he would correct me. If I did cheerleading or dance moves with girls, he’d say, ‘Don’t do that.’” Tensions deepened during Alfaro’s teenage years, with his father eventually kicking him out, unable to accept that his son was gay. With no place to live, Alfaro logged on to Gay.com, an early social-networking site, looking for companionship and help. There, he connected with a man in his early thirties, Jason Daniel Gandy, who introduced himself as a wealthy entrepreneur and offered to lend a hand.
“I was in such a vulnerable place,” Alfaro recalls. “I spilled my whole story. He was understanding. He said he had the means to help me — a nine-bedroom home in Austin,” a couple of hours away. “I thought about my options — I had nowhere else to go. He picked me up at sundown.”
Gandy was on the lookout for boys who had slipped through the cracks. He was a predator — a prolific sex trafficker who manipulated boys into performing sex acts with men through his erotic-massage business.
The scope of sex trafficking is difficult to measure, and the exact number of victims in the United States is unknown. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates that one in six of the more than 25,000 cases of children reported missing in 2021 who had run away were victims of child sex trafficking. “There is a commonly perpetuated belief that victims of child sex trafficking are almost exclusively female,” a 2018 study by the center found. “Though males may comprise a smaller proportion of victims, their numbers are significant.”