I just received an email from a reader that I thought was relavant to this discussion. It's not the first time I've received this sort of comment. He had read some of my stories on another site (one not specifically bdsm oriented). What he said was:

"Actually, I read all of them over the last day, and enjoyed them all. It's the first time I've been able to really understand the attraction to B&D..."

The point is, you don't need celebrities. What you need is a story that will get the reader into the heads of the characters so that he will understand. If you feel your story won't work without celebrity characters, then you've got a weak story and you probably need to put some more work into it.

Also, I think the search and replace gimmick is likely to be more than most readers are willing to put up with. When confronted with that, they're likely to pass it up and read something more accessible.