BUENOS AIRES — Latin America's first gay couple to become legally married on Tuesday urged other homosexuals to follow their lead to the wedding altar.

"I'm making an appeal to all gay people, all lesbians, all transvestites in Argentina," said Alex Freyre, 39, accompanied by his new spouse Jose Maria Bello at a press conference, one day after their historic nuptials.

"If you want to get married, you can!" an exultant Freyre declared, urging fellow gays to lobby the legislature to formally change the federal code to explicitly allow same-sex marriage.

Freyre and Bello on Monday became the first homosexuals to legally marry in heavily Roman Catholic Latin America, after the governor of southernmost Tierra del Fuego province allowed them to wed.

The pair tied the knot in Ushuaia, the windswept capital of the province.

"It is a dream come true for us. We are completely moved, and so happy for what this means for all gays and lesbians in Argentina," Freyre said shortly after Monday's service.

Until now, no Latin American country has recognized gay marriages, although Mexico City's legislature has approved them to be held starting in February.

The wedding in Argentina, meanwhile, has been the subject of protracted legal wrangling.

The country's civil code does not recognize same-sex marriages, but a court approved the wedding of Freyre and Bello. Their wedding then faced a legal challenge which was to have been heard by the Supreme Court, after a civil registrar in Buenos Aires refused to officiate in the wedding.

The couple traveled recently to Tierra del Fuego to work for an anti-discrimination institute however and formalized their union there, since the state's governor Fabiana Rios "was a person who sympathized with this cause," Di Bello said.

The couple said they were bracing for new possible legal challenges from those opposed to the marriage and who might seek to have it annulled.

All the same Di Bello called his wedding "a step forward toward judicial equality for every man and woman" in Argentina.

"We believe that more homosexual couples will be able to marry in Ushuaia," he said.