HERO

Badass Clerk Who Issued First Ever Gay Marriage License in U.S. Dies at 78

“I always stood by my actions,” Clela Rorex told Esquire magazine in 2016. “I never backed away from them.”

Clela Rorex, newly elected to the Boulder County Clerk position, was faced with a sticky dilemma. It was 1975, and two men had requested a marriage license after being turned away in Colorado Springs. She reached out to her superior, Assistant District Attorney William Wise, who she recalls saying: “If you want to go ahead and issue a license, you’d be within your legal right to do so. It’s your decision.” So she did. Then she did it five more times for other same-sex couples until she was ordered to stop, a full four decades before the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The trailblazing LGBTQ+ ally passed away in hospice care at 78 on Sunday. “I look back at her life now and I really admire her,” Rorex’s son Scott Poston told the Daily Camera. “How many times she walked through the unknown and was a kind of frontier-person, breaking down walls.” Rorex decided not to finish her term as clerk but told Esquire magazine in 2016, “I always stood by my actions. I never backed away from them.”