If Baptist revivals featured potty-mouthed preachers and masked go-go dancers shimmying alongside the choir, they’d be a lot like a Hidden Cameras show. The band plays what’s invariably described as “gay church folk music,” songs ecstatic enough to get even notoriously staid Toronto crowds dancing in the aisles. And they were doing just that recently in the packed pews of the Music Gallery as the Cameras debuted songs from their fourth album, Awoo. The crowd was typically atypical, ranging in age from tween to senior citizen, straight couples gleefully waltzing to the ballad “The Man I Am With My Man.” The stage was packed with revelling musicians. At the centre of it all, carefully orchestrating the chaos, was Joel Gibb, the Cameras’ 29-year-old founder and leader, whooping, screaming and crooning in a voice that’s both slightly nasal and soothing.

Like Broken Social Scene, whose ascendancy paralleled the Cameras’, Gibb’s band boasts a large, multifarious lineup, known for their moonlighting in other groups. Over the past decade, they’ve become one of the country’s most successful indie rock acts—the British music bible NME adoringly called them more subversive than Marilyn Manson, and in 2003, they became the first Canadian band signed to the legendary U.K. record label Rough Trade. But unlike BSS, the Cameras have never harboured socialist dreams. “It’s not a collective,” Gibb says wryly over a jicama salad at the Queen West vegan restaurant Fressen. “It’s just that there’s more than four people in the band. That doesn’t make it a collective; it makes it a band with more than four people.” Plus, Gibb is definitely the star of the show. Tall, with the leanness of a swimmer and a face like Montgomery Clift’s, he has a fondness for both nerd chic (New Balance runners) and old-school queer uniform (tight, striped tank tops, black motorcycle jackets). Gibb’s songs juxtapose unabashedly homoerotic lyrics—golden showers and the pleasures of washing a lover’s underwear figure prominently—with angelic harmonies and sugary melodies.

Gibb—who spent much of the past year in Berlin with his opera director boyfriend—was raised in Mississauga, the middle child of a social worker mother and accountant father. An arty kid, he started playing music in high school with his friend, the painter Paul P. He majored in semiotics at the University of Toronto—“It was a way for me to study everything”—while also recording songs in his bedroom, music influenced by the trippy folk-pop of The Byrds and Nick Drake. He handed out CDs of these four-track recordings—many of which would comprise the first Hidden Cameras album, Ecce Homo—to anyone who would listen. After graduation, he worked in record stores, an art gallery and a copy shop, but writing and recording music became his main occupation: “I made it my job,” he remembers. “And if you make it a job, then it is a job.”