It’s 11 p.m. at Cube nightclub on Queen St. W. The place is throbbing and it takes a minute to figure out what is amiss: There are a hundred women poured into tiny nightclub dresses, vocal chords fully engaged, smartphones snapping a hundred pictures a minute and not a male in sight.

Correction. There is one man: Mobbed in a VIP corner and the centre of all this excitement is Shemar Moore, the hunk of a star from CTV’s No. 1 rated drama Criminal Minds. Moore is here for the first of a three-night, late-night, multiclub promo tour of his clothing line, Baby Girl, now available in Canada.

“I’m his biggest fan. Seriously,” says Shauna Solomon, who is celebrating her recent graduation from McGill with a psychology degree. “If I had to trade my degree to meet him, I would.”

A gorgeous blonde in towering heels, Solomon intends to standout. She is right up against the bouncers surrounding Moore and a battalion of models wearing his logo booty shorts, flanked herself by a trio of pals, also dressed to impress.

She explains how Moore has been keeping in touch with what he calls his Toronto “baby girls,” Tweeting and Instagramming his progress through the airport, posing with the security guards, making the rounds from one pop radio station to another.

Baby Girl, at www.shemarmoore.com , is less fashion than fan-wear — think multicoloured logos on booty shorts, crop tees and pajama tops as well as Snapback hats. The name is his tagline: Moore’s hunky FBI Behavioural Analysis Unit character Derek Morgan flirts with his pal, the blushing eccentric computer whiz character Penelope Garcia, and he calls her his “Baby Girl” on the show.

Cheryl Bigelow from Etobicoke and Nicole Welts of Toronto, both legal assistants, heard about the event on clubcrawlers.com. “I’ve been watching him since his Y and R days,” says Welts of Moore’s early career on the Young and the Restless daytime soap opera. He’s not just hunky, she says, he’s a role model.

“And now he’s on Criminal Minds, which is my dream job.”

Bethany King, a fashion management student at Humber College, had no trouble finding willing bodies to show off the Baby Girl gear for the “show” part of the evening she was organizing. She cast the rotating crew of 18 girls from her college and on a recruiting site called Model Mayhem.

“So many people love Shemar, he has so many fans in this city, my email exploded. These people drove from Cambridge, Markham, Richmond Hill, Brampton and Mississauga.”

Moore himself, decked out in reflective Ray Bans and fingerless gloves and one of his own Snapbacks, is specially equipped to handle a scream scene: “I’ve been coming to Toronto since 1995, since my Young and the Restless days,” he says.

And no one can work a room like a soap vet.

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He has been relaying his love for Toronto all day to his fans, and explains the passion in more depth: “I travelled a lot as a child,” says the 43-year-old actor. “I was raised in Denmark, and Bahrain. I didn’t learn English until I was in school at age 5. Toronto is a city of so many different ethnicities, so many beautiful women.” He smiles here. “I won’t call it a melting pot, but …” he drifts off, before explaining his family connection. “I’m half black and half white, my mother is of French Canadian descent, from Quebec City, so Canada is very special to me.”

His name is an elision of his parents' names, Sherrod and Marilyn. “My family was about combining two worlds.” Born in 1970, he says his parents wanted to keep him away from that tumultuous era. In the end, he didn’t grow up with his father, who he says knew Tupac Shakur. “He wasn’t a Black Panther, but he was politicized,” something Moore wears literally.

“I’m a mixed race man. We have a mixed race president,” he says. He offers to show the tattoos on his back, which include tributes to Barack Obama, to Martin Luther King and to Malcolm X.

He spreads his own message now on social media. “I’m pretty into it. But I was against it until about 9 months ago. To be honest, I didn’t want to have to tell my future child I met his mother when she sent me a booty picture on Twitter.”

He is careful to point out that Baby Girl is not a cash grab, an attempt to spin his brand beyond the shelf-life of his current TV fame. “I make my money on Criminal Minds,” he says. “This line I do is to raise awareness and money for Multiple Sclerosis,” he says, a condition which affects his mother.

“It is amazing how much love and information we have been able to spread. My fans understand and they support the cause. My Mum really is my superwoman.”

How does he reconcile the brand fit? And why booty shorts: “My motto is “keep it silly and sexy.”

“I am so much more fun than what you see on screen. I like to dance, to have fun. I’m a big kid.”

Tonight is a love in, and the screaming isn’t going to stop anytime soon. “I have a lot of confidence. I’ve earned it. I’m chasing my dream, and these people are inspired to believe it can happen for them.”

Like any good showman, he knows the secret in a crowd is to say the host city’s name with as much gusto as possible. “This is like Disneyland, man,” he says, surveying the crowd...

“I meet women all over the place. But my gut tells me it will be a Canadian girl.”