I knew when I was summoned to the room and saw the client lying naked, no sheet over him, that this was not going to be massage therapy as I had imagined it.
Jason Gandy shut and locked the door behind me, motioned for me to undress, and told me to do everything he did. We began near the legs of the man – middle-aged and thick – and worked our way up his body. I started shivering uncontrollably, feeling impossibly cold. When the man began fondling me, I dissociated. At some point, Gandy told me I could leave the room, and it was only then that I put together that the man had been performing oral sex on me.
Gandy, some 20 years older than I was, warned me that because I was 16 and not a legal adult, I could get into a lot of trouble for giving what he called professional massages and could put myself in harm’s way by disclosing anything to law enforcement.
I believed him; I already had reason to distrust law enforcement. One night at home in the small town of Navasota in Texas, my father kept asking me if I was gay. I repeatedly tried to assure him I wasn’t – not yet having come to terms with it – and he threw my phone across the room, broke it, and hit me so hard across my face that I fell to the floor, at which point he started kicking me in the stomach. I got up, ran for the land line, and dialled 911. Once the police arrived, they told me that if they arrested my father he was going to get out of jail and abuse me further, so my best bet was to pack a bag and go somewhere else. He was the aggressor, but the police were sending me away.
Leaving my parents’ house was how I met Gandy. I had been having short stays at different people’s places, at some points coming back home only to be asked what it was going to take to ‘fix’ me and finally being literally chased from the house because my father was ‘not going to have a gay son living under my roof.’ Then, at a friend’s house where I was crashing one night, I met Gandy in an online chat room for gay men. It was 2007; chat rooms were an entrée to the LGBTQ world outside of my hometown.
Gandy responded that he felt really bad for me and could come pick me up. He painted a picture of wealth – a nine-bedroom home in a distant city, a promise to enrol me in private school – and I scrambled to the local gas station food mart to be whisked away to Houston, suspicious but desperate.
He would take me to dinner, and never pressured me for sex. It was more that I felt I owed it
The first night at Gandy’s apartment, he explained that he was a massage therapist and would love to massage me. He took off all my clothes and was naked himself. I had never experienced or even witnessed a ‘professional massage’. I knew that what was happening was probably not normal, but as a minor in survival mode, you tell yourself: ‘At least I have a place to stay.’ It was part of the grooming – lulling me by degrees, convincing me that what wasn’t normal, was.
At first, he would take me to dinner, and he never pressured me for sex. It was more that I felt I owed it. He was, after all, feeding me, keeping a roof over my head. When we did have intimate encounters, it was mechanical, without emotion. Unbeknown to me, I was already a product Gandy was intending to sell.
As time progressed, he put me on a diet. I wasn’t overweight, but he wanted me thinner because the clients he intended to sell me to wanted underage boys, and I looked even younger when I was skinnier. I also had to go to the gym with him twice a day, seven days a week. I could never be out of his sight.
Then one day he said that I was going to want to provide for myself, and I could make money at his massage therapy business. I thought he wanted me to be a receptionist, but he said: ‘No, I want you to actually give massages.’
That’s what led to that first massage with the middle-aged man. Without my knowledge, Gandy had already taken my image from the chat room where we first talked and was posting ads to sell me on numerous online sales rooms. After that initial experience, I didn’t want to continue, but I felt stuck. Gandy had me, if not exactly under his spell, beholden and frightened.
Clients became more aggressive. Gandy would leave the room, locking me in, and they did whatever they wanted, neatly folding their business suits over a chair beforehand and sometimes taking off their wedding rings. One who left me bleeding after having his rough way told me I reminded him of his son.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my experience was far from unusual. The percentage of sex-trafficking victims who are underage boys is virtually the same as for underage girls, according to statistics reported in 2023 by the US Department of State. Many are gay and, like me, rejected by the conservative households in which they are raised; the resulting stigma makes many of them that much less likely to pursue legal avenues for help.
It was a site where men offer room and board in return for cleaning, cooking and sexual gratification
I escaped one day when I told Gandy I wasn’t feeling well enough to go to the gym and, having become complacent, he went without me. I never knew what he was paid when he would sell me. He told me I would get a $50 cut for each encounter, but I never saw any money. There was no nine-bedroom house, either.
While I was now free of Gandy, my situation remained desperate. I spent time being raped while living with another paedophile, albeit not a sex trafficker, and then with a labour trafficker who laundered money through me by ‘hiring’ me as his so-called assistant at his construction firm and regularly withdrawing my salary from my bank account.
Five years later, with no resources, I ended up in Boston. Someone there chose me on Houseboy, a site on which men offer younger men room and board in return for cleaning, cooking and sexual gratification. He turned out to be a drunken train wreck, and I started doing sex work on my own. Then he did something kind. He threatened to kick me out unless I went back to school. He said he’d pay the bill. ‘One day you’re going to get older,’ he told me. ‘This isn’t the life you’re going to want to live.’
At first I told him no, and he said that in that case I could go back to Texas. Then I asked him: ‘What if I go to cosmetology school ?’ He was fine with that – and followed through on his offer to pay the tuition.
After graduating – I was now in my early 20s – I started out as a receptionist at an upscale hair salon on Newbury Street in Boston. Then I spent a year as an assistant before getting my own clients. From there, I was asked to work at Boston Fashion Week, then at New York Fashion Week. My life was finally going in a new direction.
Until a friend from Texas came to visit me in 2014 and handed me an article from a Houston news outlet saying Gandy had been arrested. It said that anyone who knew anything was encouraged to contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
I sent a text message in the middle of the night, hoping it wouldn’t go through. I was terrified I’d be used for testimony and then be put in handcuffs and sent to jail. Gandy’s warning still haunted me.
Four years passed between that text message and the trial. Leading up to it, articles in the press quoted Gandy’s attorney, painting me and other victims as liars who betrayed him when all he tried to do was support us. I was so nervous I was almost unable to go through with the testimony. I remember staggering to the restroom, wanting to throw up. My body was shaking uncontrollably, like during that first massage.
The verdict said Gandy was guilty on all counts. I was glad, but PTSD was taking me over
Now 27, I was one of several witnesses who spoke on the stand. It was July 2018, 11 years since the last time I laid eyes on Gandy. The hardest part was not seeing him but having to identify myself via a shirtless photo he had me take of myself back when he first started selling me. I’d seen the photo a million times, but in the courtroom, in front of everyone, it seemed like the smiling boy looking back at me was someone I didn’t know. I started crying but finally composed myself enough through my tears to say it was me.
It was only a couple of hours from my testimony to the verdict: Gandy was guilty on all counts. I was glad, but PTSD was taking me over. I was drinking heavily, suffering panic attacks, unable to get out of bed. It wasn’t just Gandy. It was the client list, the people who had purchased me and the other victims. I knew Gandy had a client book. But because of legal glitches, those men in business suits – the doctors and lawyers and other predators in positions of power, the ones who took off their wedding bands – they would never be held accountable for what they did to me and other children.
I flew back to Texas several months later for the sentencing, and Gandy was given 30 years. The next day I attempted suicide in my hotel room, breaking a glass and climbing into the tub with a shard. Fate intervened when my partner, David – a surgeon at a Boston hospital – kept calling, concerned, until I finally picked up.
A couple of years later, David and I, who are still together today, were invited to the Hamptons for a work event. We were having a really good time – so good that I missed about 10 phone calls from my father and numerous text messages. I hadn’t spoken with him in years. As I was looking at the phone, it rang again. ‘Just answer it,’ David said.
‘I’m sure you probably don’t want to hear from me,’ my father began. From there he said he was calling to invite me to a surprise birthday party for one of my sisters but then apologised: ‘I want to tell you that I’m sorry for everything.’ He also said that he was hoping we could stay in touch and become friends and maybe turn that into a relationship.
He’d always thought that, if he raged, people would back down. But this time, I simply looked at him
While talking to my father made me anxious, a hole in my heart began to fill. I had done a lot of therapy leading up to that moment, which allowed for meaningful healing. But the one part I always came back to was my broken relationship with my parents. Now, maybe, the possibility for closeness could strengthen.
‘I would love to be in touch,’ I responded.
But the phone conversation didn’t by any means put my father and me where I needed us to be. That happened when I went to Texas for the party, and my father rode with me back to the airport to see me off. We ended up in a huge argument about the past, about how my sisters don’t whip or spank their kids the way he did. That set off the raging monster. He had always thought that, if he raged, people would back down. And they did. But this time, as he screamed, I simply looked at him. No flinching, no drawing back. ‘Great,’ he finally said. ‘Now you’re never going to come back and visit again.’
‘Yes I will,’ I said. ‘And when I get to Boston I’ll call you and let you know I made it home safely.’ He just looked back at me, kind of shocked. In that moment, I knew I was done cowering. I also knew my father’s love – and its limitations. And I understood, finally, who was in control of my life. I was.
To hear more from Jose Alfaro, you can listen to his story here. To support trafficked young people or find support, you can contact the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking, Children of the Night, the Human Trafficking Legal Center, and Heal Trafficking.
