In the wake of the Robb Elementary School massacre that killed 21 people in Uvalde, 19 of them children, multiple memes have been making the rounds about how there is no limit to the number of guns someone can own in Texas, but that it’s against the law to have more than five dildos.
For the next three decades, the state used the obscenity statutes as a form of official terrorism against the LGBT community. Employees at Texas sex shops in the 2000s vividly remember vice squads repeatedly trying to arrest employees and customers. The owners instructed Heather to only refer to dildos as “condom demonstrators” to avoid running afoul of the law.
Luckily, the statute was rarely enforced, but the shadow of it hanging over patron and sellers’ heads, as well as the constant presence of cops looking to harass, made the sex toy industry a very hostile environment. By the 1990s, it was fairly common for couples to be sent to sex shops as therapy, but they could run into the same discrimination as LGBT people.