The Boulder Clerk Who Wouldn't Let a Man Marry His Horse

April 15, 1975. A cowboy named Roswell Howard pulls up to the Boulder County Clerk's office with a horse trailer and a pack of reporters. He wants a marriage license. For his horse. A mare named Dolly.

This was a stunt, obviously. A protest. And the woman behind the counter was exactly who he came for.

Her name was Clela Ann Rorex. Born in Denver on July 23, 1943. Boulder County Clerk from 1975 to 1977. And a few weeks before Howard showed up with his horse, she had done something that put her name in newspapers across the country.

How a Denver-born clerk ended up at the center of it

Here is the part people miss. Rorex did not go looking for this fight. It found her at the counter.

Late March 1975. Two men, Dave McCord and Dave Zamora, walk in wanting a marriage license. They had already been turned away down in Colorado Springs, over in El Paso County. And the story goes that somebody there told them to "try Boulder." So they did.

Rorex did not just wing it. She called Boulder District Attorney Bill Wise and asked him straight. Wise looked at Colorado's marriage code and told her something that mattered a lot. The law did not actually say marriage had to be between a man and a woman. It just did not specify.

So she issued the license.

And keep in mind, then-Boulder mayor Penfield Tate had already warned her, right after she got sworn in, that this exact issue was probably going to land on her desk. He was not wrong.

She ended up issuing six same-sex marriage licenses total before the Colorado Attorney General stepped in and ordered her to stop.

And then the cowboy shows up

So back to Howard and Dolly the mare.

He drives up, cameras rolling, and asks to marry his horse. The whole point is to make Rorex look ridiculous. To say, look, if you will marry two men, you will marry anything.

And here is where Rorex just wins the entire thing without raising her voice.

She asks how old the horse is. Howard says Dolly is 8 years old. Rorex puts her pen down and denies the request. The reason? The animal was too young. No parental approval.

I mean, come on. That is a perfect answer. She took his gag and handed it right back to him, deadpan.

It worked so well that Johnny Carson did the bit on The Tonight Show that same April. National television. The clerk who said no to the man and his horse.

Per History Colorado, and Westword laid this out in their piece on Colorado's 150th birthday, Rorex was not literally the very first official in the whole country to issue a gay marriage license. But her 1975 union of those two Colorado Springs men was the first one to make national headlines. And as Westword put it, she was "definitely the first, and probably only, official to refuse to let a man marry his horse."

What it actually cost her

Now here is the part that is not funny at all.

Being right in 1975 came with a price, and Rorex paid it. Death threats. Hate mail. Whole church congregations warning her about Sodom and Gomorrah. People calling the house to scream.

And this is the one that gets me. Her son was around 8 years old. When he answered the phone, callers spewed their hatred at a little kid.

She resigned before her two-year term was even up. She knew re-election was not happening, and she had just gotten engaged. So she stepped away. She was 31, 32 years old, doing the thing that felt right at the counter, and it more or less ran her out of the office.

Clela Rorex died June 19, 2022, in Longmont.

Boulder finally caught up

For a long time the Boulder County Courthouse actually displayed an image of Howard and his horse. The joke, basically. The stunt got the wall space.

That changed in June 2018. Boulder swapped out the Howard and Dolly photo and put up a picture of Rorex instead. The right person on the wall, finally. And the courthouse's listing on the National Register of Historic Places is tied in part to the licenses she issued right there.

The recognition kept coming. In April 2025, U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, along with Representative Joe Neguse, reintroduced a resolution to designate March 26 as "Clela Rorex Day."

So as Colorado marks 150 years, this is one of the ones worth remembering. Not a general, not a gold baron. A clerk in Boulder who read the law carefully, listened to her DA, and then held her ground while people threatened her family over it.

And who, when a man rolled up wanting to marry a horse, looked at him and said the horse was too young.

Put the pen down. Denied. Next.

That is a Boulder story if there ever was one.