It would quickly become a popular spot in town as one positive local consequence of the gay liberation movement that emerged nationally in the wake of the summer 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. Where previous gay bars in Seattle had all been clandestine establishments, Shelly’s Leg was brazen in its ambition to be a genuine safe space for the city’s gay community. Shelly’s Leg was crucially located in Pioneer Square, which was Seattle’s de facto epicenter of gay nightlife before the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood acquired that distinction in the early 1980s. Between those two countercultures, what was the historical bridge? For Seattle circa 1973, the gay nightlife scene best qualified for that distinction - and that scene acquired a crucial haven on the date in focus here with the debut of the legendary Shelly’s Leg, Seattle’s first discotheque and first openly gay nightclub. After that movement devolved in the 1970s, the word would eventually become associated with the punk movement, which crested circa 1979. What best defines the word “counterculture”? Originally coined by historian Theodore Roszak in his influential 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture, the word is most often associated with the hippie movement, which crested that same year.