RBD member comes out of the closet

Anytime one of the members of the Mexican pop sextet RBD makes news - usually for pretty inconsequential stuff, like denying anorexia rumors - traffic to my blog surges. Today, for example, band member Christian - best known for his flamboyant hair colors - came out of the closet, confirming stories that he is, in fact, gay. Rumors also abound that he tied the knot in Canada. Just as expected, traffic to my blog is suddenly brisk.

Here in Mexico RBD is sort of the Latin American answer to S Club 7 - just far more gauche.

RBD came out of the teen telenovela Rebelde, which exited the Televisa airwaves months ago, but lives on in far away places like Romania and Peru. Set in an elite private school, Rebelde in many ways highlighted the unseemly class schisms rife in Mexican society - and the fresa-naco rift. Ironically, Christian played a naco character on the show. (Naco is slang for tacky or lacking class; the newly rich are often branded nacos.) The show, though, was in many ways naco. Rebelde also ran a storyline in which one of the character's father went to the trouble of setting up his son with the father's trophy girlfriend to prove the young man wasn't gay.

Anyway, this isn't exactly newsworthy, but it's all highly amusing. I wrote on Rebelde's Canadian adventure back in 2005 - the photo sent by Tourism Alberta was smoking hot, but also, dare I say, naco?

Soy Rebelde!

The show ceased production and exited the Televisa airwaves earlier this spring, but Rebelde, the popular and over-the-top teen telenovela lives on in other markets and the show's spinoff band, RBD, which is presently recording an English-language album, keeps churning out one sappy track after another. (Actually, the group made headlines this weekend when one of the male members, Christian, insisted he wasn't gay and a female member, Anahi, said she wasn't anorexic.)

I mention all this because traffic to a posting about Rebelde on my blog exploded recently and most of the hits are coming from South America - most notably Brazil and Peru - along with Romania. Many visitors have left comments in Portugese.

My only brush with Rebelde, other than hearing RBD songs on the radio, came from writing an article for a Calgary alt. weekly - and posting it to my blog - about how the Canadian Tourism Commission and Travel Alberta teamed up to bring the show to the Canadian Rockies for a week of episodes last year. Based on the show's demographics - lot of fresa kids watched it - and the positive feelings towards Canada held by many young Mexicans, the deal apparently made sense.

Here's what I wrote ... it's amusing, which is about the best way to describe Rebelde - the uniforms, characters, social dynamics, curious storylines, etc. - and RBD.