Hostess Launches 'Pride Twinkie' With 27-Year Shelf Life, LGBTQ+ Community Says It Relates
The limited-edition rainbow cream-filled snack cake has been certified indestructible by the FDA, which queer advocates say is 'deeply on brand' for a community that refuses to die.
CHICAGO — Hostess Brands LLC announced Monday the nationwide rollout of the Pride Twinkie, a limited-edition snack cake filled with rainbow-swirled synthetic cream and coated in a gold foil wrapper bearing the legend Still Here — a tagline that the company's marketing team insists is celebratory and that no one at the company thought about for more than four seconds. The cake has a certified shelf life of twenty-seven years, which the FDA called "a nutritional anomaly" and which drag performer Vicious Fontaine of Denver, Colorado called "my entire therapeutic journey in sponge cake form."
The Pride Twinkie launches amid what industry analysts are describing as the most aggressively hostile legislative environment for LGBTQ+ Americans in living memory, with forty-three states currently debating some variant of a bill that would criminalize, restrict, tax, surveil, reclassify, or simply make extremely uncomfortable the act of existing while queer. Hostess, for its part, issued a statement calling the snack cake "a delicious symbol of resilience," then quietly pulled its sponsorship of three Pride festivals in states where the phrase delicious symbol of resilience has been added to a list of grooming-adjacent terminology under pending House Bill 7741.
"They will literally sell you the rainbow and then bill the governor for the wrapper," said Dr. Petra Wynn, a queer studies professor at the fictional Dunmore College of Applied Despair, speaking from a parking lot in an undisclosed red state. "The Twinkie never goes bad. It just sits there. Preserved. Waiting. Technically alive but not permitted to flourish. I have never felt more seen by a baked good." She then ate the Twinkie. She said it tasted like childhood and compromise.
The Pride Twinkie retails for $4.99, comes in a box of two, and will be discontinued in August. Hostess confirmed that the gold foil wrappers are not recyclable. A spokesperson noted that a portion of proceeds will be donated to the company's internal "inclusion task force," which has four members, meets quarterly, and once spent forty minutes debating whether the word ally needed a disclaimer. The snack cakes are expected to outlast the task force by approximately twenty-six years and eight months.