(Rerun) (context.)
In 1994, a coalition of feminists and right-wing politicians in Canada passed a tariff code called Butler that was designed to restrict pornographic production. Instead, it was applied in such a way that it allowed officials at Canada customs to systematically detain and destroy gay and lesbian materials at the border. A gay bookstore in Vancouver, Little Sisters, had so much of its product seized that it could no longer operate. As a result, Little Sisters decided to sue the Canadian government.
Little Sisters is a particularly interesting test case, for a reason that a lot of histories tend to gloss over. (caveat: Schulman plays a little fast and loose with the histories, so you do have to dig: ["Butler" was the name of a 1991-1992 case)
The interesting thing is that the courts played by all the ideals.
((Customs itself not so much, often to ridiculous extents.))
Butler explicitly and repeatedly found that the obscenity law was only valid to the extent that it did not act on sexual orientation, and has been applied to trounce lower courts that had even the whiff of homophobic motivation in censorship acts. In both cases, they were able to convincingly argue that the law was regularly and heavily applied in heterosexual contexts, and indeed that it was motivated by those heterosexual contexts. The Supreme Court put the onus on Customs to prove obscenity and that the restriction was not discriminatory, and told lower courts to look at the case again. The Little Sisters cases as a whole didn't actually end until 2007, and then only because the Little Sisters Books simply couldn't keep funding the fight, rather than any closure on the facts.
And it didn't matter, and it should have been blindingly obvious that it wouldn't matter. The Canada population in 2000 was just at 30 million people. Assume 75% are over the age of 18, and that of those, 2.5% are gay, and 2.5% are lesbians, and of those 10% are into 'harsh' BDSM. It's not just that you could fit the resulting demographic slice into a single stadium, but that this still isn't genuinely narrow enough to filter for production and demand properly.
And, for those of you a little ahead of the game, that's very nearly a best-case scenario! The lesbian and gay sides of the aisle are relatively big minorities, and this skips over the part where someone might like bondage but not masochism. A Canadian transman looking for BDSM fic is probably almost an order of magnitude smaller a demographic slice. 3.5% of Canada's population is black -- be a real big pity if any are gay and interested in seeing porn involving People Like Them.
((VancouFur managed to get just over 1k furries in one building and raised 2.5k for charity; whether that represents an unusually high or low level of coordination is left as an exercise for the reader.))
Just the costs of the Little Sisters trials probably end up something along the lines of per 5 dollars per possible buyer in the entire country, and while Little Sisters Books got some of that through donations it's still a sobering amount. The bookstore itself regularly found shipments delayed by weeks, and the court case itself was old enough to buy porn before it was finally put down. According to Autostraddle, this was the only LGBT bookstore in the city, and it routinely had staff dealing with a federal court case. 80%+ of its stock was imported from outside of Canada, for the very simple reason that you can't demand one in a thousand queer BDSM-loving Canadians to author adult long-form fiction. Some shipments were held in customs for over two months. They would not be able to invite government officials in Customs to discuss advice and guidance, as Penthouse had in past years, nor would they be able to afford the time or energy constraints of the pre-approval process, nor would outside publishers be able to justify the edits and reprints required by such, for such a small audience.
In short, it doesn't matter whether we're the first against the wall or the tenth. Even if the law didn't specifically target minorities, even if customs weren't jackasses, even if the courts routinely bent over backwards recognizing minority rights and how focused they are on treating us equally. The cold mathematics of being a minority, on its own, mean that any interaction with the law, any false positive, or any arbitrary enforcement, may not have the majority's option of an alternative in thirty miles -- it may not have an option in-province. Test cases may be legal and fair and even have outsider financial support, and still be ruinous to bring even part of the way to fruition, and cost years of men and women's lives. Demands to match local norms and fashions will not be devastating just because they block the majority of content, as they do for majorities, but because the remainder that survives can be counted without taking your shoes off.