Interview with Clela Rorex, the first person to issue same-sex marriage licenses in the U.S. back in 1975, long before marriage equality had come into the national spotlight.
She had married about six gay couples in Colorado during a time when the idea was so unthinkable that there weren’t actually any laws in place to stop her.
~Jester
Anthony Sullivan and Richard Adams were sitting in their Los Angeles living room watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson when they first heard about a feminist county clerk in Boulder, Colo., who was issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
It was April 1975, and Sullivan, an Australian national, had already been lying low, trying to avoid immigration authorities who wanted him deported. Although the men had been in a loving, committed relationship for several years, the Nationality Act of 1965 declared that homosexuals were “excludable at entry” into the U.S. And with the prospect of any state — let alone a nation — establishing marriage equality still seeming unreachable, the couple knew what they had to do.
They packed their bags. They flew to Colorado, and drove to Boulder, a picturesque college town situated at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Then, with the signature of Boulder County Clerk Clela Rorex, the two men tied the knot. Legally. The couple then spent nearly 40 years together.
Sullivan and Adams, a naturalized American of Filipino descent, were one of six same-sex couples legally married in 1975, after Rorex, 33 at the time, reviewed Colorado law and determined there was no legal justification to deny marriage to same-sex couples. She confirmed her interpretation with the Boulder District Attorney prior to issuing the first license.
Soon after, however, then-Colorado Attorney General J.D. MacFarlane ordered Rorex to stop letting same-sex couples wed, and delivered his opinion that the six licenses were not valid. But MacFarlane never actually ordered those licenses invalidated.
Unlike that of Jack Baker and Michael McConnell — the first known same-sex couple to obtain a marriage license in the U.S. in 1971, whose contract was never recorded — Adams and Sullivan’s marriage license remains on the official record of Colorado to this day. Many legal experts see their license as valid. In fact, record of their marriage is the basis on which lawyers have based their current case to obtain a marriage-based green card for Sullivan following Adams’s death in 2012.
