Next door, at T-Mobile, tired partygoers relax on white pouffes under the watch of a fuchsia unicorn. The pier is lined with promotional marquees: in a Delta Air Lines tent stamped with the tagline “Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries”, couples are invited to sit for digital caricatures sketched by artists on iPads outside, a flight attendant in uniform pushes a trolley through the crowd dispensing flashing party wristbands. The shout, emitted by a girl in knee-length rainbow socks and matching headband, is swiftly drowned out - first by the growl of Beyoncé’s “Formation” blaring through an enormous festival-style sound system second, by the collective whoop of the thousands of women assembled beneath it. One June evening, on a broad pier jutting out into the Hudson river from the west side of Manhattan, New York, three words hang briefly in the sticky summer air: “Merry gay Christmas!”
