By Shelby
Throughout Buffalo’s long and often forgotten history, its cultural diversity and sordid past (and present), coupled with its stringent segregation and myriad injustices, there have been voices that have stood out fighting for justice and equity, especially among the LGBTQIA+ community. In years past and to this day, these voices have risen up, taken part, and done all they can to help our community and our city thrive in various forms.
Editor’s note: The list below was curated by Shelby, a community member, writer, and musician. Shelby chose the individuals listed below because of their impact on the local community, both over time and currently. Shelby believes the individuals below are having an impact on Western New York’s community for the better. Between inclusion and intersectional acts, these folks are bridging gaps and doing so for the pure desire to make life better for those around them.
Folks Who’ve Shaped Buffalo
Amid those who have impacted the LGBTQIA+ community nationally from our small corner of the
country, there are those who remain staples within our community. They may not be nationally recognized icons, but to the community of Buffalo, they are icons nonetheless, especially within our LGBTQIA+ community.
Ari Moore
An integral part of Buffalo’s LGBTQIA+ community, Ari, a Black trans woman, has spent decades making
Buffalo safer, especially for LGBTQIA+ people of color. An artist, activist, and archivist, she has been a predominant voice within our community since the 1970s. Having co-founded the city’s first trans-rights advocacy group, Spectrum, she also formed the African American Queens group. With a degree in Art Education from Daemen College, Ari became an art instructor at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and taught at the Langston Hughes Center, while owning and operating the Inner City Art Studio. For twenty-five years she served as an officer in the Buffalo Police Department before retiring. Through her life and career, Ari has done her part to ensure safety and space for LGBTQIA+ members of the Buffalo community and continues fighting for the rights of trans people of color in our city.
Madeline Davis
A folk singer born in 1940, Madeline was born and raised in Buffalo. She was an activist for LGBTQIA+ rights throughout her entire life, starting in 1970, when she co-founded the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier, the first LGBTQIA+ rights organization in WNY. She was the first openly lesbian delegate in the DNC and taught the first course on lesbianism at the University at Buffalo, Lesbianism 101, in 1972. In 1994 she also helped co-found the HAG Theatre Company, the first all-lesbian theatre company in the U.S. A founder and writer for Fifth Freedom, one of the earliest LGBTQIA+ publications in WNY, she was a political activist, fighting against police raids of gay bars throughout Buffalo, and confronted the Buffalo Vice Squad for their use of entrapment and raids that endangered the city’s LGBTQIA+ community. She co-authored a number of books that supported the rights of lesbians through the stories of gay women in Buffalo. Through her research, archiving LGBTQIA+ works, activism, and folk music, Madeline fought tirelessly for the rights of LGBTQIA+ people in Buffalo and throughout the United States until her death in 2021.
Tonya “Kita” Harvey
From the earliest age, Tonya “Kita” Harvey could not be “placed inside a box,” as her mother once put
it. A singer and dancer, Tonya was an inspirational figure to all those in Buffalo who knew her and was a successful performer in the LGBTQIA+ community. Frequenting places such as Club Marcella, she was best known as a trans burlesque dancer who lived very openly, sharing her journey of transition with any who wished to listen. Beloved by family and friends, both part of and apart from the LGBTQIA+ community, the once effervescent Tonya was gunned down by an unknown person(s) in February 2018, for unknown (but speculated) reasons, cutting short her remarkable life. She was warm and full of life, expressive, ferocious in spirit, and deserved far better than to be known nationally as the third trans person murdered in 2018. Having been a Black trans woman, it was through Tonya’s death that real conversations were had on the disproportionate murder of trans women of color in our country and brought to light the failure of both local and nationwide police departments to properly care for, let alone investigate, the murders of trans women of color.
Mickey Harmon & Jordan Celotto
Long before their tragic murder in March 2025, Mickey and Jordan were both quintessential members of the LGBTQIA+ community in Buffalo. Mickey, a vivacious and outspoken activist, was an influential visual artist, from his architectural renderings of iconic Buffalo structures to iconography depicting his love of various gay subcultures. Co-owner of The Good Stuff Gallery, formerly Pine Apple Co., he helped showcase local artists and crafters and provided a place for them to collectively sell their creations. Often seen in his gold crown, he was a beacon of a person, one people were effortlessly drawn to. Both boisterous and warmhearted, he was easily one of the best the Buffalo LGBTQIA+ community had to offer.
Jordan, a gentle soul and member of the Six Nations, was Mickey’s partner of five years and a local DJ from the Niagara Region. He performed at various clubs and events throughout Buffalo, after making it his home with Mickey, and helped support Mickey’s art and activism. A staple at the LGBTQIA+ café, The Intersection, Jordan was part of what made Allentown and the greater Buffalo LGBTQIA+ community feel like home. Both Mickey and Jordan are missed greatly, and both have been memorialized in a mural outside The Intersection café at the corner of Elmwood and Allentown, a testament to how impactful their lives were to our community.
Michael “MYQ” Farrow
Musician, writer, and activist, Michael “MYQ” Farrow has used their gift of lyricism and performance to promote unification and social justice throughout the greater Buffalo area for years. Having founded their band Farrow in 2019, they have lent their performances to various organizations throughout the years, mainly those supporting the LGBTQIA+ community and those affected by income disparity in Buffalo. With the desire to make space for others and join the working class together, the lyrics of Farrow are both powerful and uplifting, often taking “harder to digest” themes and making them palatable in order to welcome more people in than keep others out.
Through their work, both with Farrow and in solo ventures, they hope to preserve the essence of our community, especially that of Buffalo’s LGBTQIA+ community. They have also been working on a project aimed at preserving the oral histories of the residents of our city, particularly disenfranchised groups, as a way to preserve what is often gentrified and displaced, and they hope to leave a record of us being here, far more than mere writing on a bathroom stall.
Vanessa Oswald
Both a writer and dancer, Vanessa Oswald is well known within the Buffalo and LGBTQIA+ community here and in NYC for her burlesque performances and various burlesque troupes. Her current burlesque
troupe, The Glam Vamps, is a fully inclusive troupe that welcomes dancers of every background, form, figure, and identity. Often performing up to three or four times a month, The Glam Vamps promote loving one’s self and unabashed entertainment and are beloved by our community throughout Buffalo. Vanessa herself takes her love for dance so to heart, she provides lessons not only in burlesque but also in other forms of dance, such as hip-hop and contemporary, and the joy it gives her is evident in her infectious smile as she performs. An advocate for gay and women’s rights, she brings a genuine kindness to the very embrace she grants those within the Buffalo LGBTQIA+ community, and through that kindness has become quite the icon indeed.
Nicholas Tiede
“Steward” of The Underground nightclub, Nicholas has been helping run and operate the prominent gay
club of Buffalo since 2010, when he took over. Utilizing the club as its own form of outreach, granting a space for those within the LGBTQIA+ community to create art and express themselves as a daring act of revolution, Nicholas has provided our community with a truly safe and welcoming space. He has also worked with Evergreen Health, in affiliation with the club, fundraising for their AIDS Walk over the years. As part of the Pride Bar Crawl, Nicholas ensured part of the proceeds went to organizations such as GLYS and also joined Underground in a community bar crawl for BryLynn. It was no wonder then, when COVID hit and threatened the life of Underground, the community banded together to help reopen the safe haven many in the LGBTQIA+ community of Buffalo call home.