Hometown Queens and Superheroes: Ari Moore’s Queer History of Buffalo

That night in the spring of 2016 when a friend introduced us to Ari Moore, it became clear that she would quickly outdrink us. We sat in one of Buffalo’s surviving gay bars, where off-kilter cocktails compensate for trashy music and cheap liquor. In complete Sunday church lady regalia, she prophesied the impending demise of several iconic pop women performers of the younger generation, seamlessly weaving in the narrative threads of her own life. Attentive, we nodded, as if seated in a professor’s office. Earlier that winter, soon after we had founded the BuffaloNiagara LGBTQ History Project, people informed us at every step that no substantive endeavour of collecting, performing, and archiving the queer history of this city could unfold far without Ari Moore. Even the ones slightly older than her. It’s clear to me now: not merely has Ari been part of, a witness, and confidante to much of Buffalo’s and this region’s trans, queer, and black history. She is herself a historian-performer, or if you will, a performative scholar of queer past and future.