I've been in Adelaide most of the last week for a sex worker conference.

It was the weirdest thing - I lived there my entire life up until two years ago, yet I found myself losing my sense of direction the whole time..... I was unexpectantly homesick for a while, how cheap to live, how pretty, how quiet, how easy to get around - Adelaide has many things going for it. Then I saw my sister, two exs (one nice, one nasty), and numerous gay men I hadn't seen for years in the space of five days. It cured the homesickness.

The conference itself was amazing - people who had been around the sex worker rights movement for ages, and brand new people. At this stage the movement seems pretty healthy, it's not big and established enough to start policing its image and kicking out any sense of diversity.

We had quite a decent sized sex worker contingent for the Adelaide Pride March, which is the beginning of the Feast Festival. Our chant of 'Sex worker rights are human rights; sex worker rights are industrial rights' seemed to resonate with the crowd.

The recent loss of beautiful Kenn (I attended the funeral the day before getting on a flight to Adelaide) and a sucessful conference which as usual felt like an oasis of sex worker safe space in a desert has been a bittersweet experience. I've been laughing and crying for over a week - often at the same time. It's affirmed for me how much I value the gorgeous fellow sex worker activists in my life and how important nurturing community space for marginalised communities is.