Nearly 40 Years and Counting
Kent and I met almost forty years ago. We were married in the Episcopal Church in the early 1990s, at a time when the church was having a vigorous public argument about whether that was even something it should be doing. We didn’t wait for the debate to settle.
In the decades since, we’ve shared twelve homes across five states and one country, which means that by the time most couples are just beginning to consider a move, we’ve already done it eleven more times than they have. We don’t pack lightly, but we do pack efficiently. There’s a difference.
Spain: The First Time We Did This
In 2007, we moved to Spain on an investor visa and opened a craft cocktail bar on the Mediterranean coast in Marbella. This was before craft cocktails became the standard American bar menu — we were doing something genuinely ahead of its time in a place that had no particular reason to expect it.
It worked. We built a real business, made lasting friendships, and found ourselves with a client list that included more than a few European faces you’d recognize from the B and D lists — which, if you’ve ever worked in hospitality, you know is exactly as entertaining as it sounds.
We walked everywhere. Grocery shopping meant loading up the granny cart — a small wheeled basket that Kent mocked enthusiastically the first time he saw one, and quietly became devoted to approximately one week later. Spain taught us that a different life doesn’t just mean a different address. It means a different relationship with your neighborhood, your food, your time, and what a Tuesday afternoon can actually feel like.
We thought we’d found our forever home.
Then 2008 happened.
What the Financial Crisis Taught Us
The global financial crisis didn’t arrive all at once. It arrived the way most bad things do — gradually, then suddenly. We watched our business slow, then struggle, then become unsustainable. We held on longer than we probably should have, the way you do when you love something and can’t quite accept that it’s over.
Eventually we closed the bar, said goodbye to friends and clients and a life we had genuinely loved, and came back to the United States to rebuild. We lost several hundred thousand dollars in the process.
We want to be clear about that number — not for sympathy, but because it’s the most honest credential we have. We’re not people who read about the risks of moving abroad and decided to warn you. We’re people who lived those risks and came back.
And still want to do it again.
The Second Chapter: Panama
That last part is the thing that has surprised even us, a little. The experience of losing the bar in Spain was genuinely painful. It took years to rebuild financially and emotionally. But it never extinguished the belief that a life abroad is the right life for us — it just clarified that the next time we did it, we’d approach it differently.
More research. More legal preparation. More honest self-assessment before we fell in love with a place.
That process — the structured, clear-eyed approach to figuring out whether moving abroad makes sense and where — is actually what this site is built around.
We chose Panama after working through a serious decision-making framework with the help of AI tools — a process we’ve documented separately at ChoosingLifeAbroad.com. Panama won out over other serious contenders for reasons that are specific to our situation: the Pensionado visa works for Brian’s Social Security income, the Friendly Nations program allows Kent to establish residency through property investment, the dollar eliminates currency risk, and the flight home is three hours.
We’re traveling to Panama this week — Brian to begin his Pensionado visa application, Kent to begin evaluating the property market. We plan to move in approximately four years.
Everything we learn along the way will be on this site: the honest answers, the useful numbers, the things the promotional content never mentions, and the occasional observation about what it’s like to navigate Panamanian bureaucracy as two Americans who have already done this once and have no excuse for being surprised when things take longer than expected.
Why This Site Exists
We built Gay Expats Panama because when we went looking for resources aimed specifically at gay men and women considering this move, we kept finding either generic expat content that treated our concerns as an afterthought, or cheerful promotional material that answered every question except the ones we were actually asking.
Questions like: Will we feel safe? Can we live openly? What does our relationship mean legally in a country that doesn’t recognize it? Where is the community?
Those questions deserve real answers. This site is our attempt to provide them — from people who are going through the process in real time, with no incentive to make it sound easier than it is.
We’re Kent and Brian. We’ve done this before. We know what can go wrong. And we’re doing it again anyway.
That probably tells you everything you need to know about us.
Have questions or want to connect? Reach out here.
