A hush settled over the auditorium as the transgender diva Crystal Love, dripping with jewellery and unfurling a handheld fan, moved into the spotlight and began lip-syncing to a pop power ballad.
In the tiered seating opposite, a small crowd of mostly queer and Indigenous people watched dutifully on.
"We are still very marginalised," Ben Graetz, the creative director of the event that had brought them all there, said.
"We are a minority within a minority, so there's a lot of battles ahead of us."
An Iwadja and Malak Malak man with Torres Strait heritage, Mr Graetz was in the Darwin as part of a nationwide push to include more black voices in the nation's largest rainbow event.
Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world will descend on Sydney WorldPride — Mardi Gras' big sibling — from next February.
As creative director, Mr Graetz and his team see it as an unrivalled opportunity to put queer Indigenous people on the world stage.
"Our culture is rough like a diamond: it's hard to chip away and to make it beautiful," Ms Love said.
"It's like a cut diamond — when you put it under light, it glitters and shines."
A full-circle moment for the boy from Darwin
When Mr Graetz first arrived in Sydney, he was a closeted 18-year-old finding his way in a community still in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
His return decades later, at the helm of Sydney WorldPride, was a full-circle moment his younger self could seldom dream of.
"Growing up as a queer little black boy here in Darwin had its challenges, and I never thought in my wildest dreams that I'd be the festival creative director for our biggest celebration of Pride in the Southern Hemisphere," he said.
In the period in between, Mr Graetz has been involved in major Indigenous cultural events, had a stint as a flight attendant, and gained a following on the Top End drag circuit under his alter-ego Miss Ellaneous.
As years went on, the creative began to spend as much time on the stage as working behind it, turning the spotlight on queer and Indigenous talent through events like a national drag pageant.
Through its annual Mardi Gras event, Sydney won the bid to host WorldPride in 2019, and Mr Graetz took up the role a short time later.
"It's all of the things I've done in the past — times 20," he said.
"That brings all of the problems — times 20."
His team quickly identified an opportunity to make sure First Nations representation kept pace with big strides in LGBTIQA+ representation and acceptance.
"In general, in society, our First Nations community has been forgotten in a lot of ways," Matika Little, a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi woman who works in First Nations engagement with Mardi Gras said.
"Of course, Mardi Gras, as a part of Australia and an event that runs here, is not immune to that."
Finding voices across Australia
The team is now halfway through a journey through regional hubs like Darwin, Broome and the Tiwi Islands — home of the transgender Tiwi sistergirls — consulting with gender diverse Indigenous people.
Ebony Williams, who also works in First Nations engagement, says the people showing up have been from all kinds of backgrounds.
"It's a been a very different mix of people, obviously, and will continue to be that," the Wiradjuri and African-American woman said.
"The people that are turning up are very much connected to their communities and are very much wanting to shine a light on that by saying we do have a large population of lesbians, we do have a large population of gay men, we do have brotherboy and sistergirl communities as well, we want to come together and be a part of this."
A 16-person Indigenous committee, appointed by the organisers, is also advising WorldPride as it plans things like Indigenous spaces and the event's human rights conference.
"I was born in Darwin, grew up in Katherine, and spent a lot of time in community, in Ngukurr in my mum's community," Desmond Campbell, a Gurindji and Ngalakan man who sits on the committee, said.
"As a young person, you didn't really see or hear about a lot of LGBTIQ+ people.
"They were there and you would kind of see them in your community, but there was no celebration around their identity and who they are and what they represented."
Garnering visibility is a "mammoth effort", according to Mr Graetz, but the long-term goal is erasing the stigma his peers continue to face.
"When I look over my journey and particularly my journey here in Darwin and the challenges I had as a young, queer boy, I'm just so honoured that I can come back here and really show that it's okay to be queer, that in a small town like this, that there is support, and that it's about reaching out to community," he said.
