We develop a method for deriving integral representations of certain orthogonal polynomials as moments. These moment representations are applied to find linear and multilinear generating functions for $q$-orthogonal polynomials. As a byproduct we establish new transformation formulas for combinations of basic hypergeometric functions, including a new representation of the $q$-exponential function $\mathcal{E}_q$.

We show that the Meixner, Pollaczek, Meixner-Pollaczek, the continuous $q$-ultraspherical polynomials and Al-Salam-Chihara polynomials, in certain normalization, are moments of probability measures. We use this fact to derive bilinear and multilinear generating functions for some of these polynomials. We also comment on the corresponding formulas for the Charlier, Hermite and Laguerre polynomials.