After decades spent on the fringes of politics, publishing and Australia’s sex industry, join Robbie Swan and Fiona Patten as they finally tell the stories they could never quite leave behind.

Part memoir and part social history A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Sex Party is a collection of short stories drawing on Swan’s 25 years as a magazine editor and parliamentary lobbyist for the adult industry, a world where censorship battles, moral crusades, unlikely friendships and political absurdities collide daily. In the book, he reveals the human side of an often-misunderstood industry: the humour, the resilience and the strange, sometimes surreal encounters that shaped a generation of activists and outsiders.

Spanning half a century and bookended by the creation of the Australian Sex Party with his partner, trailblazing MP Fiona Patten these stories chart how a life spent challenging taboos and fighting hypocrisy ultimately helped reshape public debate and law reform.

Wry, candid and funny, this is a behind-the-scenes look at the remarkable profiles of people behind the intersection of sex, politics and power.

Robbie Swan and Fiona Patten ran Australia’s adult industry association (the Eros Association) for 25 years before founding The Australian Sex Party and getting Fiona elected to the Victorian Parliament. In her eight years in the Upper House she proved to be one of the most successful independent MPs, chairing the influential Legal and Social Issues Committee and initiating over a dozen pieces of socially progressive legislation including Voluntary Assisted Dying, legalising Uber, decriminalising sex work, implementing spent convictions laws and abortion law reform.