In the midst of 2023, that a trans woman should finally decide to come out of the closet and show herself as she is should not be news. The problem is that Sheila Devil, the artist formerly known as Camilo Blanes Jr, has been worrying her family for a long time. She tries to call for calm, but every new image she uploads to Instagram is like the captain of the Titanic trying to reassure the crew by helping to sink the ship himself with a pickaxe.
Disclaimer: To clarify the reading, in the moments of his life when he answered to the name “Camilo” we will name him in the masculine.
Camilín
However, it has not always been like that. When he was born, from the fleeting relationship of Camilo Sesto and Lourdes Ornelas, the singer described him, as soon as he got off the plane, as “his happiness”. He must have been very happy, because, despite Ornelas’ attempts to get him back, he clung more and more to his father, who at that time was triumphing all over the world with international tours and even had the courage to release an album in English. It was clear to him since he was a child: that’s what he wanted, what he needed, what would complete his life. Music.
But of course, being Camilo Sesto’s son puts one more handicap to the already difficult career of dedicating oneself to music: you have to live up to your father, a Camilo Sesto who was losing more and more communication with him and who ended up allowing him to go to Mexico to live with his mother. It is then that this misunderstood introvert continues to train his vocal cords looking for his chance.
Camilo Sesto was incredible, a voice that made him an idol in a late-Francoist Spain accustomed to the Dúo Dinámico and Los Pecos, the Rosalía and Bad Bunny of the time. He single-handedly unleashed a whole Camilomania that could not last forever, of course: in 2014, at 68 years old, Camilo Sesto had already released what would be his last album (the live ‘Todo de mí’) and, although he was still performing, his life was more decadence than anything else. It was time for his son to finally let his voice be heard.
Dental veneers and alcohol
Said and done: Camilo Blanes releases ‘Todo de mí’, his first album, at the age of 29. It goes unnoticed, yes, but his vocal cords promise that his father will have a legacy… that remained just that, a promise. Addicted to various substances and with the traumatized head that only the withdrawn son of a celebrity constantly pursued by the cameras can have, Blanes marries and divorces fleetingly, puts on dental veneers to avoid showing the ravages of drugs and tries not to get carried away by the quicksand.
Camilín managed to be more or less out of the media eye and live quietly until September 8, 2019, a kidney failure ends with Camilo Sesto at 72 years old. The singer named his son as the sole heir to his entire fortune, setting up the most explosive cocktail in the world: a person with addictions, all the money in the world and media noise around him. What was to come, in the end, surprised no one.
Since his father’s death, he has only had one moment of lucidity: the recording of a tribute album to his father entitled -oh, surprise- ‘Tributo’. The problem is that, no matter how well trained your voice is, if you want to live up to the best Camilo Sesto, it’s not enough to be his son. Not only was the album a failure (on all levels, believe me: it’s on Spotify and you can check it out for yourselves), but he also closed the doors of the music industry himself by refusing to sign several contracts he already had agreed upon, allowing the filming of a series about his protenitor or the preparation of a musical-homage. Instead, he locked himself in a hecatomb of alcohol, drugs and bad ideas. Spoiler: it goes wrong.
Instagram is the devil’s work
No matter how much his mother warned the media about the state of health of her little one (“He is sick and needs help,” she said): until we saw him live on his Instagram with a whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, eating pasta with his hands and babbling incoherently until his girlfriend tried to take his cell phone to stop the self-humiliation: “Don’t take my phone or I’ll take your hand off in one blow. I’m a macho man”, he assured, as if a time machine had taken him out of the worst episodes of ‘Cuéntame’.
By then he had already kicked his mother out of the house and squandered a large part of the inheritance on alcohol and various vices. When Ornelas returns home, after the Instagram direct, he is found claiming that he is “the chosen one” and that Satan has nothing to do against him. You’d think you couldn’t get any lower, but sometimes basements surprise with more subway floors. And the fact is that at the end of 2021, after celebrating his birthday, he ended up admitted to a hospital in Madrid on the verge of death due to a lung condition: some say as a result of five days of sleepless partying. His relatives say it was the result of a bicycle accident. The truth is probably somewhere between the two.
The next step in her life, a year later, was to come out as a trans woman to her family first and to public opinion later: her name was Sheila Devil (which she had already used at other times in her musical career) and she didn’t want to show anything about her that wasn’t true. Goodbye to dental veneers and pictures on her Instagram as Camilo Blanes. Hello to stardom (sort of). Her photos show a worrisome spiral (with phrases like “say dro to the nogas”) and let it be seen that her life is a chaos of partying and, once again, bad decisions.
Ornelas believes she has gone into “self-destruction mode”, her ex-partner can’t talk to her, bad company surrounds her and everyone wonders what the next step on the road is: Is there an end down the line for someone who has everything but wants nothing? Is it too late for Sheila Devil or is it the first step towards being who she really is? So far, the seemingly reassuring skateboard rides near her home have reassured no one. It won’t be long before we know the next episode of this soap opera.
