The hundreds of same-sex couples who said "I do" at City Hall this week have been heralded as the first in the nation to enjoy marriages sanctioned by government.

Clela Rorex knows differently.

Back in 1975, when she was the county clerk for Boulder, Colo., Rorex made headlines -- and enemies -- when she changed the words "male" and "female" to "person" on the county's marriage license application and allowed six same-sex couples to wed.

None of the licenses has held up in court -- but then, not all of them have been challenged.

And at least one of the four gay male couples celebrated their 25-year wedding anniversary a few years ago. Rorex also helped two lesbian couples tie the knot.

"At the time I issued those licenses, I honestly had no strong personal conviction on the issue," said Rorex, who is now 60 and the corporate treasurer for the Native American Rights Fund in Boulder. "I was 30 years old. I wasn't gay, and I didn't really know anything about homosexuality."

Shortly after taking office in 1975, Rorex was approached by a Colorado Springs couple who had been turned away by El Paso County in their quest to marry.

"The county clerk there said, 'I don't do that, but they do that kind of thing in Boulder,' " apparently because Boulder had recently passed an ordinance outlawing housing discrimination against same-sex couples, Rorex said.

"I got an opinion from the district attorney's office indicating that the marriage statute at that time did not preclude giving a marriage license to people of the same sex," she said. "I issued a license and a few more before the state attorney general weighed in."

At the time, Colorado Attorney General J.D. MacFarlane told the New York Times he didn't consider the licenses valid but had no plans to challenge them in court.

"At that point, the D.A. backed away and said that the state attorney general's office does not have superiority, but in the eyes of the public, they do," Rorex said, adding that she was afraid the certificates would mislead couples into thinking they had rights the state would not recognize.

So, about a month after she began, she stopped issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

"It created a furor. It was horrendous," Rorex recalled of those weeks in the spring of 1975. "I got volumes of hate mail. I got mail from entire church congregations ... saying I was creating a Sodom and Gomorrah."

One outraged man came into town with his mare, Dolly, and asked Rorex to marry them. Her answer was no -- at 8 years old, the horse was under age, she said.

Rorex said she would do it all again in a heartbeat.

"I was an accidental historian back in 1975," she said. "Today, I would calculatingly do it."

As for her own love life, Rorex is now divorced.

"I was never able to have a successful marriage myself. It never worked for me," she said. "But I'm just watching (San Francisco) and saying, 'Right on!' "