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.”
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