The Hidden Cameras 
The Smell of Our Own 

You could barely escape the stale stench of late-90s chart rock in the early 2000s. Santana and Rob Thomas were hogging the Billboard charts, and it felt like the culture needed a revival, a break from the mindless MOR pop churned out by the music industry. The freaks, geeks, and queers had spent most of the last decade hiding from the douchebag frat bros who thought Fight Club was a documentary. No one person would be able to reclaim the zeitgeist on their own; it was going to take an army.

As is usually the case, behind every good army is an exacting general with a vision and ambition. Enter Joel Gibb, the maverick maestro behind the Hidden Cameras. Ecce Homo arrived in 2001, unapologetically gay and loving it. Gibb’s “gay folk church music” would evolve from solo bedroom recordings into a small but mighty collective of artists performing live who quickly started drawing global attention. While contemporaries Godspeed You! Black Emperor was unintentionally laying the foundations of a “scene” in Montreal, the Hidden Cameras were spilling the seeds of what scenesters eventually referred to as Torontopia. But before You Forgot It in People made the white-privileged smart-asses at Pitchfork pitch a tent in their cargo shorts, The Smell of Our Own emerged as a beacon of eccentricity and unapologetic queerness that remains a poignant testament to the diverse, disparate, and delightfully eccentric indie music scene in Canada at the time. (If you haven’t checked it out, stop reading this and check out Michael Barclay’s essential Hearts on Fire: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000-2005. I’ll wait.)

The Smell of Our Own is rooted in 2SLGBTQIA+ pride as much as in provocation. Everyone and their great aunt Sylvia were blushing over Gibb’s gall at suggestively singing about watersports on the opening track, “Golden Streams.” Most of the cis, straight world failed to recognize how the song primarily addresses the inherent challenges and dangers of what being out meant for the queer community. In the “frozen dead of night” when fear, like incontinence, “Runs down [your] knees in fright,” it still wasn’t safe publicly or culturally for 2SLGBTQIA+ people to express their queerness outside of the community. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, the heteronormies repeatedly told us. Still, at the time, very few public figures were coming out of their own volition and without professional repercussions. Very few were doing so without the spectre of shame, deceit, and self-doubt hanging over their stories. Not so for Joel Gibb. As his one-time bandmate Owen Pallett describes, The Smell Of Our Own “is a document of the explosive sexuality of young gaydom, in its beauty and its sadness” presented “in a way that is equally titillating and self-critical.” And though the songs are sung predominantly from the lens of gay cis male experiences, the collective Gibb gathers into the Hidden Cameras suggests that all genres, genders, sexualities, and intersectionalities are welcome to the party.

Cheeky and spilling over with double entendres and glockenspiel in equal measure, “Golden Streams” is forever embedded in my coming-out story, as is all of The Smell of Our Own. At a time when I had resigned myself to my queerness but was nowhere near ready to accept and celebrate it, the Hidden Cameras were offering me solace, refuge, and community. As an introverted and obsessive music connoisseur, to hear someone describe it as their boyfriend (and conversely, their boyfriend as music) hit hard in a way that I never saw coming. The restless urgency of “Ban Marriage” cut to the bone for twenty-something me, who felt the pressure of all his straight peers coupling up and walking down the aisle while I was secretly “fingering foreign dirty holes in the dark” (I’ll let you decide if that’s literal or figurative). 

At the time, mainstream media was (and still is) trying to pass off a sanitized version of homosexuality as progress and enlightenment. The same year that The Smell of Our Own was released, the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy TV series debuts, joining NBC’s Will & Grace (airing Mondays at 9:30) as “family-friendly” gay representation on TV. Queer Eye aired on cable (Bravo), mind you, as did the American version of Queer as Folk (Showtime) and Six Feet Under (HBO), the only places I could find any gay-themed storylines on episodic TV. Commenting to Designer magazine at the time, Gibb didn’t hold back his disdain for the pasteurization of his people: “It’s kind of depressing to be seen, really, as sanitized images… I’ve seen [Will & Grace] a few times, and that character isn’t even gay; the actor isn’t gay and doesn’t appear gay in any way, and he never has sex. It’s a cop-out.” 

The Smell of Our Own was fully invested in getting straight people to identify with gay perspectives in the way that gay people had always identified with heteronormative art. Of all the album’s songs, “The Man That I Am With My Man” connected most to the latent queer kicking and screaming inside my psyche. It wasn’t the explicit depictions of sex but the idea that I, as a man, could (and would) someday claim another man as mine for more than just thirty to forty-five minutes at a time. The boundary-expanding ballad challenged my belief that being gay meant I would spend my life alone. It seems obvious and anodyne an idea now, but in 2003, it blew my mind. 

I rarely listen to The Smell of Our Own now, but when I do, it immediately transports me back in time. Not because it’s dated but because of my deep emotional connection with it. Like the aromas from a freshly cracked bottle of poppers, the rush of hearing The Smell of Our Own still hits where it matters all these years later. The album’s exploration of queer themes, lush orchestration, and unfiltered honesty continue to resonate. Not just as a time capsule of its moment but as a testament to music’s enduring power, reminding us that love, like music, transcends binaries.