Editing Janis Joplin (section)

==<span class="anchor" id="Sexuality"></span><span class="anchor" id="Sexuality and relationships"></span><span class="anchor" id="Same-sex relationships"></span><span class="anchor" id="Romance"></span>Personal life==
Joplin's significant relationships with men included ones with Peter de Blanc,<ref name="buried" /><ref name="Willett 55" /><ref name="stthomassource.com" /><ref name="ccwhois.org" /><ref name="Joplin, Laura" /> [[Country Joe McDonald#Personal life|Country Joe McDonald]] (who wrote the song "Janis" at Joplin's request),<ref name="Cabral">{{cite book |last=Cabral |first=Ron |title=Country Joe and Me |publisher=[[AuthorHouse]] |year=2004 |isbn=978-1-4184-0642-4}}</ref> David (George) Niehaus,<ref name="amburn" /><ref name="dalton" /><ref name="Joplin, Laura" /><ref name="Garvin, Glenn">{{cite news |url=https://www.janisjoplin.net/news/bandmate-recalls-janis-joplins-big-appetite-in-tv-doc/ |title=Bandmate recalls Janis Joplin's 'big appetite' in TV doc |first=Glenn |last=Garvin |newspaper=Miami Herald |date=November 6, 2007 |via=JanisJoplin.net |access-date=December 30, 2011 |archive-date=May 14, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200514214424/https://www.janisjoplin.net/news/bandmate-recalls-janis-joplins-big-appetite-in-tv-doc/ |url-status=live }}</ref> [[Kris Kristofferson]],<ref name="amburn" /><ref name="buried" /> and [[Seth Morgan (novelist)|Seth Morgan]] (from July 1970 until her death, at which time they were allegedly engaged).<ref name="Seth Morgan's Last Ride">{{cite journal |url=https://www.janisjoplin.net/news/seth-morgans-last-ride/ |title=Seth Morgan's Last Ride |date=February 1, 1991 |journal=Esquire |via=JanisJoplin.net |access-date=April 16, 2020 |archive-date=April 23, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200423182000/https://www.janisjoplin.net/news/seth-morgans-last-ride |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine |title=Blues For Janis |magazine=[[Time (magazine)|Time]] |date=October 19, 1970 |page=63}}</ref> She also had relationships with women. During her first stint in San Francisco in 1963, Joplin met and briefly lived with Jae Whitaker, a woman whom she had met while playing pool at the bar Gino & Carlo in [[North Beach, San Francisco|North Beach]]. Whitaker broke off their relationship because of Joplin's hard drug use and sexual relationships with other people.<ref>{{cite book |date=2015 |title=Janis: Little Girl Blue}}</ref> Whitaker was first identified by name in connection with Joplin in 1999, when Alice Echols' biography ''Scars of Sweet Paradise'' was published.<ref name="scars" />

Joplin had an on-again-off-again romantic relationship with [[Peggy Caserta]].<ref name="amburn" /><ref name="Garvin, Glenn" /><ref name=":0" /> They first met in November 1966 when Big Brother performed at The Matrix in San Francisco. Caserta was one of 15 people in the audience;<ref name="caserta" /> at the time, she ran ''Mnasidika'',<ref>{{cite web |last1=Kruger |first1=Charles |title=Review: 'Out Of Site Haight Ashbury': A Performance Driven Queer History Tour from EyeZen Presents (*****) |url=https://theatrestorm.com/2021/06/16/review-out-of-site-haight-ashbury-a-performance-driven-queer-history-tour-from-eyezen-presents/ |website=TheatreStorm |access-date=August 7, 2022 |language=en |date=June 17, 2021 |archive-date=September 28, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220928151756/https://theatrestorm.com/2021/06/16/review-out-of-site-haight-ashbury-a-performance-driven-queer-history-tour-from-eyezen-presents/ |url-status=live }}</ref> a clothing boutique in the [[Haight Ashbury]]. Approximately a month after the concert, Joplin visited Caserta's boutique and said she could not afford to buy a pair of $5 jeans for sale, asking to make a 50 cent down payment.<ref name="caserta" /> Caserta was amazed such a talented singer could not afford $5, and gave Joplin a pair for free.<ref name="The redemption of Peggy Caserta">{{Cite web|url=https://www.fugues.com/2020/10/01/the-redemption-of-peggy-caserta/|title=The redemption of Peggy Caserta|date=October 2020|access-date=July 12, 2021|archive-date=July 25, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210725090354/https://www.fugues.com/2020/10/01/the-redemption-of-peggy-caserta/|url-status=live}}</ref> Their friendship was [[Platonic love|platonic]] for more than a year.<ref name="caserta" /> Before it became romantic, Caserta was in love with Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, and sometime during the first half of 1968 traveled from San Francisco to New York to be with him.<ref name="caserta" /> He did not want a serious relationship, and Joplin sympathized with Caserta's disappointment.<ref name="caserta" /> The ''Woodstock'' concert film includes 37 seconds of Joplin and Caserta walking together before they reached the tent where Joplin waited for her turn to perform. By the time the festival took place in August 1969, both were intravenous heroin addicts.

<!-- Do we really need all of this detail about an event that may not have even happened? -->According to Caserta's book ''Going Down With Janis'', which Caserta has since disowned, Joplin introduced her to her boyfriend Seth Morgan in Joplin's room at the Landmark Motor Hotel on September 29, 1970. Caserta "had seen him around" in San Francisco but had not met him.<ref name="caserta" /> At some point, an agreement was made for a [[threesome]] to take place the following Friday, although Caserta later said she immediately abandoned the idea once she realized it was Morgan who would be with Joplin. Morgan made alternate plans, believing Caserta would be with Joplin that evening. Each one was unaware the other had bowed out.<ref name="vulture.com">{{Cite web|url=https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/peggy-caserta-janis-joplins-love-comes-clean-for-real.html|title=Peggy Caserta, Janis Joplin's Love, Comes Clean (For Real This Time)|date=August 2, 2018|access-date=July 12, 2021|archive-date=August 1, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210801040954/https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/peggy-caserta-janis-joplins-love-comes-clean-for-real.html|url-status=live}}</ref> The day after Joplin introduced Caserta to Morgan, Caserta saw Joplin briefly when Caserta accommodated her new Los Angeles friend, 19-year-old Debbie Nuciforo.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/deborah-nuciforo-obituary?pid=1000000176388939 |title=Deborah Nuciforo Obituary – Palm Springs, California |date=November 7, 2015 |website=Legacy.com |access-date=July 31, 2017 |archive-date=August 9, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170809043314/http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/deborah-nuciforo-obituary?pid=1000000176388939 |url-status=live }}</ref> Nuciforo was an aspiring rock drummer who wanted to meet Joplin<ref name="caserta" /> and was high on heroin at the time. The meeting of the three women was reportedly brief and unpleasant. Caserta suspected the reason for Joplin's foul mood was that Morgan had abandoned her earlier that day after having spent less than 24 hours with her.<ref name="caserta" />

Caserta did not see nor communicate by phone with Joplin again, although she later claimed she had tried to reach Joplin at the Landmark Motor Hotel and Sunset Sound Recorders. Caserta and Morgan lost touch with each other; each had independently made plans for Friday, October 2. Joplin mentioned her disappointment over both friends bailing out of their ''[[ménage à trois]]'' to her drug dealer on Saturday while he was selling her the dose of heroin that killed her, as Caserta later learned from the dealer.<ref name="amburn" /><ref name="caserta" /> Biographer Myra Friedman commented in her original version of ''Buried Alive'' (1973):<ref>{{cite book |first=Myra |last=Friedman |title=Buried Alive |date=1973 |edition=1st (Hardback)}}</ref>
<blockquote>Given the near-infinite potentials of infancy, it is really impossible to make generalizations about what lies behind sexual practices. This, however, is probable: to become clearly [[homosexual]], to make the choice that one honestly prefers relations with one's own sex, no matter the origins of such preference, requires a certain integration, a stability of psychic development, a tidiness of personality organization. The ridicule and the humiliation that took place at that most delicate period in [Joplin's] early teens, her own inability to surmount the obstacles to regular growth, devastated her a great deal more than most people comprehended. Janis was not heir to an ego so cohesive as to permit her an identity one way or the other. She was, as [the psychiatric social worker she saw regularly in [[Beaumont, Texas]] in 1965 and 1966] Mr. [Bernard] Giarritano put it [in an interview with Friedman], "diffused" -- spewing, splattering, splaying all over, without a center to hold. That had as much to do with her original use of drugs [before she first met Giarritano] as did the critical component of guilt and its multiplicity of sources above and beyond the contribution made by her relationships with women. Were she so simple as the lesbians wished her to be or so free as her associates imagined!<ref name="buried" /></blockquote>

[[Kim France]] reported in her May 2, 1999, ''[[The New York Times]]'' article, "Nothin' Left to Lose": "Once she became famous, Joplin cursed like a [[truck driver]], did not believe in wearing undergarments, was rarely seen without her bottle of [[Southern Comfort]] and delighted in playing the role of [[sexual predator]]."<ref>{{cite news |first=Kim |last=France |url=https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/02/reviews/990502.02francet.html |date=May 2, 1999 |title=Nothin' Left to Lose: Janis Joplin proved that a female rocker could self-destruct as quickly as a man |work=The New York Times |access-date=August 6, 2016 |archive-date=February 15, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170215135010/http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/02/reviews/990502.02francet.html |url-status=live }}</ref> On July 11, 1970, Joplin made a revealing statement about her sexuality to her friend Richard Hundgen, the [[Grateful Dead]]'s San Francisco-based road manager, whom she had known since 1966. When Joplin and Hundgen were offstage during a San Diego gig for both Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company, she said the following that he later repeated to Myra Friedman:<ref name="buried" />
 
<blockquote>I hear a rumor that somebody in San Francisco is spreading stories that I'm a [[dyke (slang)|dyke]]. You go back there and find out who it is and tell them that Janis says she's gotten it on with a couple of thousand cats in her life and a few hundred chicks and see what they can do with ''that''!<ref name="buried" /></blockquote>

Joplin's [[body art]], with a wristlet and a small heart on her left breast by the San Francisco tattoo artist [[Lyle Tuttle]], marked an early moment in the popular culture's acceptance of tattoos as art.<ref>{{Cite news |first=Deb |last=Acord |title=Who knew: Mommy has a tattoo |newspaper=[[Portland Press Herald]] |date=November 10, 2006}}</ref> Another trademark was her flamboyant hair styles, which often included colored streaks and accessories such as scarves, beads and feathers.