Episode notes
Hannah Boggs Nieman and her mother, Tamera Helms, join us to talk about three generations of women in one Church of God family. Tamera's mother, Betty Clemens, came out in the late 1980s, when there was little in the church to read and nobody safe to ask. Tamera came out years later, after working through the clobber passages herself in an seminary exegetical paper. Hannah grew up knowing her grandmother and her grandmother's wife, and came out as bisexual in her twenties — handed a baton, as she describes it, that her mother had to forge first. We talk about what their church said and didn't say from the pulpit, what the General Assembly resolved in 1979 and after, and what it costs a congregation to neither condemn nor affirm.
Intro music: Golden Sunrise (Instrumental) by Josh Woodward, used under CC-BY license.
Outro music: piano performed by Betty Clemens, recorded by Tamera Helms, October 2022, used by permission.