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She arrived in Seattle in 1968, where and when she initially lived in Rainier Valley in the home of a Black family. Bauman then spent several years living as a homeless drifter, traveling around the country and supporting herself by working as an exotic dancer. Her mother then told her that that man was in fact not her true father - and then kicked her out of the house forever. After her family moved to Florida, her innocence was shattered at the age of 16 when her father committed suicide. Born in Illinois on July 23, 1947, she grew up in Chicago, where she studied classical dance as a young girl. Shelly Bauman’s life was poignant even before that fateful accident. And that accident would lead directly to the venue’s creation.
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Her bar was indeed named after her leg - which she lost in a bizarre accident in Pioneer Square three years before the venue’s debut. The bar’s intriguing name revealed a life story as tragic as it was briefly triumphant - namely, the life story of its co-founder, Shelly Bauman, a straight woman. At the height of the venue’s local popularity, when it attracted as many straight patrons as gay clientele, a huge, hand-painted sign above the bar declared to all who entered, “Shelly’s Leg is a GAY BAR provided for Seattle’s gay community and their guests.” 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. In March this year, a transgender woman said she was sexually assaulted in the unisex restroom.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. “The reality is, if people are looking to perpetrate anti-gay bias and violence, there are very few places in this world that are safe once that intent has formed,” Sharon Stapel, the former executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, said at the time of the attack. The assailants were arrested, and one was later charged with hate crimes. Two men attacked another man in the restroom in 2010 after he informed them that they were in a gay bar. The Stonewall Inn played a central role in the modern gay rights movement, but it has also seen antigay and anti-transgender violence in recent years. He told the court that he could not remember setting the fire because he had blacked out after drinking an entire bottle of whiskey.
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Masmari pleaded guilty to arson and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in July 2014. More than 700 people were in the club at the time, including much of the city’s gay and transgender leadership, but no one was hurt. Musab Mohammed Masmari, 30, poured gasoline on the stairs of a gay club and set it alight shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve. He was sentenced to four life terms in 2001. Gay, who told the police he was on a mission to kill gay people, said he was upset that his last name had made him the target of anti-gay jokes. I wasn’t out to anybody except my very close friends.” “When it happened, I was not out to my family,” Joel Tucker, who was shot in the back during the rampage, told The Washington Post last year.