In San Francisco, former supervisor Dan White was tried for the murder of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California. White's attorney argued that his diminished capacity was partly evidenced by his consumption of junk food, particularly Twinkies—a media simplification that became known as the Twinkie defense. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder, receiving a sentence of less than eight years, sparking the White Night riots.

The Twinkie defense entered American literary and poetic vocabulary as the ultimate symbol of legal absurdity and the failure of the justice system to protect marginalized communities. The murder of Harvey Milk and the trial's outcome inspired a significant body of LGBTQ poetry and protest verse, and the phrase itself became a poetic shorthand for the gap between legal reasoning and moral justice, referenced in works from the AIDS crisis poetry of the 1980s and 1990s to contemporary queer verse.