In 1963, a fraternity at the University of Texas at Austin held a vote. The category was ugliest man on campus. They nominated Janice Joplain. She was 19 years old. She was the only woman on the list. They thought it was funny. She talked about it for the rest of her life. To understand what that vote meant, you have to understand what the University of Texas was in 1963.
It was the flagship institution of a state that had very clear ideas about what a person should be. Texas in 1963 was a place of social hierarchies enforced with the specific confidence of people who have never had reason to question them. The fraternities and sororities at UT Austin were not peripheral to campus life.
They were campus life. They determined who mattered and who didn’t. who was welcome and who was visible only as the wrong kind of visible. Janice Joplain arrived at UT Austin in 1962. She was from Port Arthur, 200 miles away, a Gulf Coast oil town that had spent her entire childhood telling her in various ways that she was wrong.
The wrong face, the wrong interests, the wrong music, the wrong energy. She had hoped Austin might be different. Austin was different. the folks seen at Threadgills, the people she met who were interested in the same things she was interested in. This was different from Port Arthur. But the university itself was still Texas and Texas still had an opinion about Janice Joplain.
The vote was organized by a fraternity as part of the campus social calendar. the specific fraternity, the specific mechanism of the vote. These details exist in various accounts and have been documented by biographers including Myra Freriedman and Ellis Amber. What is consistent across the accounts is the essential fact they nominated a woman for a category that was meant to mock ugly men.
They published the results. They did it in the open in print with the casual impunity of people who did not believe that what they were doing required justification. She was already different in every way that a Texas university in 1963 punished. her clothes, her hair, her refusal to perform the femininity that was expected, her loudness, her opinions, the specific combination of qualities that made her Janice Joplain, and that made the social world around her deeply uncomfortable.
The vote was the official declaration of an unofficial verdict that had been building for years. You are not one of us. You are not acceptable, and we are going to say so in print so everyone knows. She learned about it the way you learn about something at a university through the specific speed of campus gossip and campus newspapers and the faces of people who have seen it and are watching to see how you will react.
She did not give them the reaction they may have expected. She did not disappear. She did not become quiet. She did not make herself smaller, but she was hurt. She talked about it enough in the years that followed that the hurt was clearly real and clearly lasting. In a 1970 interview, she said, “I was laughed out of class, out of town, and out of the state.
Tried to go to college, and all they did was laugh at me. They voted me the ugliest man on campus.” She laughed when she said it. The specific laugh that people use when they are describing a wound they have decided to refuse. The laugh did not mean it didn’t hurt. The laugh meant I survived it. But I remember she left UT Austin.
She went back to Port Arthur. She tried to be ordinary. The engagement, the classes at Lamar, the hair cut short. We have documented that attempt in another chapter of this story. It failed as attempts to be someone other than who you are tend to fail. She went to San Francisco. She joined Big Brother and the Holding Company.
She performed at Mterrey June 16th, 1967, Monterey Pop Festival. 7,000 people. She sang Ball and Chain. Mama Cass Elliot watching from the side of the stage turned to someone beside her and mouth, “Did you see that?” The footage of the performance shows the moment when 7,000 people simultaneously understood that they were witnessing something that would not come again.
In Austin, Texas, the fraternity brothers who had voted her ugliest man on campus were living their lives, working their jobs, raising their families. Most of them probably not thinking about a vote they had cast as a joke four years earlier. They did not know what they had done. They did not know that the girl they had mocked and published and dismissed was on a stage in California stopping the world.
They did not know, and perhaps this is the most important thing, that their cruelty had not worked. It had hurt her, but it had not stopped her. She talked about it on the Dick Cavitt show in September 1970, 9 days before her death. She told Cavitt about the Port Arthur reunion, the 10-year reunion she had attended that August, where she had returned as the most famous female rock singer in America, to the town and the people who had laughed her out.
She mentioned the vote. She said it with a laugh. She said it with the specific complicated expression of someone who has achieved the external markers of vindication and knows that vindication does not actually close the wound. Kavat was visibly moved. The audience responded. She sat in the interview chair with her southern comfort and her feather boa and she talked about being voted ugliest man on campus at 19 years old. And she laughed.
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and the laugh was real and the hurt underneath the laugh was also real. Both things were true at the same time. They were always both true at the same time for Janice Joplain. Here is what needs to be said about the people who cast that vote. They were young. They were acting within a social code that the institution and the culture had given them.
They were doing the thing that the world they lived in told them was acceptable to do to someone like her. None of that is an excuse. It is an explanation, and the explanation does not make the vote less cruel or its effects less lasting. Janice Joplain spent a significant portion of her adult life carrying the wound of being told officially and in print by an institution of higher learning, that she was ugly, that she was the wrong kind of visible, that the specific way she looked and moved and existed was something to be mocked
rather than accepted. She converted that wound into music. The pain that informed ball and chain, that informed piece of my heart, that informed the specific quality of total emotional honesty that stopped rooms cold. Some of that pain had a name. It had a campus and a fraternity and a ballot and a published result she never forgot.
And she never let it be the last word. The last word was Mterrey. The last word was cheap thrills at number one. The last word was pearl. The last word was a voice that is still on the radio 55 years after her death. Still reaching people, still telling the truth in the way that only she could tell it. They voted her ugliest. The world decided otherwise.
She knew both things. She laughed about one of them. She let the other one live in the music. And the music is still there. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
