Thomas Breen photo
Fairmount Theater owner Gilberto Gonzalez, Jr.: "I don't know how we're surviving, because we're not making any money."
Could this become New Haven's last remaining movie theater?
Gilberto Gonzalez, Jr. wants to sell the porno movie theater he owns in the Annex — but he can’t find any buyers.
He wants to spruce up the decaying commercial building into an adult cinema to be proud of — but he can’t find any lenders.
He wants to retire and move on from screening sexually explicit films he doesn’t particularly enjoy watching — but he’s still catching up on bills from the theater’s Covid-era closure.
So for now, as he’s done for the past 13 years, Gonzalez shows up to work at the Fairmount Theater on a near daily basis to keep one of New Haven’s last remaining movie houses chugging along. Until whatever happens next.
Gonzalez, Jr. is the owner and manager of the Fairmount Theater, a rundown single-story adult cinema at 31 Main St. Annex that is open from noon to 8 p.m., seven days a week.
The theater, red-scripted marquee still barely intact, is located just off of the highway near the East Haven border. Gonzalez said it’s been around for decades, and was once a popular Mafia-owned commercial movie theater that attracted local and state political dignitaries to opening night screenings.
For as long as he’s visited the Fairmount, however, and certainly ever since he bought it back in 2010, the theater has shown only one type of film: that of adults having sex with other adults.
“I don’t know how we’re surviving,” Gonzalez mused during a Wednesday afternoon interview in his office as he teed up the DVD for It’s A Group Thing 2 for one of the Fairmount’s three screening rooms. “Because we’re not making any money.”
This reporter first learned about the Fairmount’s existence last week, in an email newsletter by retired New Haven Register columnist Randy Beach.
Beach’s newsletter was in response to the Independent’s reporting about the pending closure of the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street. He noted the various New Haven movie theaters he’s written obituaries for over the years, including the York Square and the Lincoln. He ended his newsletter by noting wryly that, if the Bow Tie does indeed close, there will still be one movie theater left within New Haven’s city borders: the Fairmount.
“That’s a rundown one-screener in the Annex section of New Haven,” Beach wrote. “It shows porno films.”
Curious to see what this potential last-New Haven-movie-theater-standing looks like, and how a porno movie theater could still survive in the age of the Internet, this reporter biked through New Haven’s industrial port district, past the highway off-ramp for Exit 50, and over to Main Street Annex.
A passerby on Main Street Annex could be forgiven for thinking, at first glance, that the theater is permanently closed. Beneath the marquee’s overhang, the front windows are dark. The doors are closed. There are no signs or posters and advertisements in sight indicating what movies if any might be playing inside.
There is, however, a piece of paper taped beside the front door indicating that theatergoers should use the side entrance.
True enough, just around the corner, through a parking lot with a half-dozen cars — a mix of Massachusetts and Connecticut license plates — is a ramp leading to a metal door bearing the word: “Entrance.”
In the lobby ...
... sex toys and condoms (below) for sale.
On the other side of that door is a movie theater. Of sorts.
The Fairmount has three screening rooms separated by red and black curtains from a lobby where, instead of popcorn and Twizzlers and Pepsi, customers can buy condoms, vibrators, butt plugs, and DVD copies of such movies as “Girls of the Internet 3” and “Asses.”
A half-dozen customers — all men apparently over 50 — came into the theater over the course of this reporter’s 30-minute interview with Gonzalez. Most walked between screening room and screening room, spending a few minutes in each before moving on to another. Some browsed the DVDs for sale in the lobby. No one spoke to one another, besides the occasional new arrival with cash in hand for Gonzalez to cover the cost of admission.
The Fairmount screens pornographic movies continuously during its hours of operation. Gonzalez said 30 customers typically show up on any given weekday, and double that number on weekends. Fifteen dollars will get you an all-day pass during the week ($10 for women), and it costs $20 per person to go to the Fairmount on weekends.
"Some People Have No One To Talk To"
Gonzalez, 63, was born and raised in Meriden, the child of parents from Puerto Rico.
“I don’t like coming to work,” he confessed. But “I’ve been here so long …”
“I’ll be honest with you, the only reason I’m here is, when I was young, I had no place to go,” he continued. “I’m gay. I had no one to talk to.” No one he felt comfortable being out around. The spaces he wound up gravitating to were those like the Fairmount.
He said he worked for a “private booth” outfit in Manchester that let individual customers into small enclosed areas to watch pornography by themselves. He then bought the Fairmount 13 years ago thanks to a business connection of his brother.
“For me, I’m looking for a safe haven. I’m looking for a safe environment where” people of any gender or sexual orientation “can come and enjoy a movie.” That is, an adult movie. “I don’t play movies that are abusive to women,” he promised.
He used to live in Morris Cove, and was eager to talk about the pros and cons of a busier Tweed airport for people like him looking to make the occasional trip to visit family in Florida. He now lives in Wallingford. “Housing is ridiculous,” he said about the cost of living in New Haven.
“I’m not into this at all,” Gonzalez said, gesturing towards the three TV screens on his office’s wall that showed the three movies then playing in the theater’s screening rooms. One showed a close up of a woman sucking a man’s penis. Another showed two men on a couch engaging in anal sex. “I prefer to read books and magazines with adult material” instead. (This reporter, having read the 2009 Yale Daily News article “Lonely men in a lonely theater” before heading off to the Fairmount, didn’t go into one of the curtained-off screening rooms, choosing instead to interview Gonzalez in his office.)
Gonzalez said that his dream for the Fairmount has long been to turn it into a true destination for men: complete with a barber shop, a private gym, and spruced-up movie screening rooms. “We can’t do any remodeling” though, he said, “because the banks refuse to loan to an adult” cinema.
Gonzalez said he also struggles to find “good help that won’t rob you blind.” He said four people work at the Fairmount now, including himself. He’d love to find someone to buy the theater from him, but so far hasn’t had any luck. “I wish someone would take it over and bring it back to its former glory.”
He said he had to shut down the theater for a year at the start of the pandemic. He’s still catching up on bills from a year of lost revenue and no federal Small Business Administration (SBA) loans available to tide him over.
Who comes to watch movies at the Fairmount?
Gonzalez said that most of his theater’s customers are “lonely” men of an “older generation.” Some live with their children and “don’t have adult material at home.” All men want access to “adult material,” he insisted, even if they don’t admit it to themselves.
Some are “married men,” Gonzalez said about the Fairmount’s customers. Some are transgender. Many eschew labels of gay or straight.
Others are “homeless,” including one guy who came to the theater to sleep in an air conditioned space. And “some men don’t admit they’re pigs,” but are.
Reflecting on why he has remained at the Fairmount for as long as he has, Gonzalez laughed, “Maybe I’m a pervert?”
Why does he think the Fairmount has been able to remain open in the age of the internet, when it’s so easy to watch pornography for free in privacy and alone?
“Most of my clientele are older,” he said. “It’s a place to get out of the house. Some people have no one to talk to.”
He said that customers drive from as far as Massachusetts and New York and New Jersey to go to the Fairmount. There aren’t many other adult cinemas left. He said the only other such theater left in Connecticut that he’s aware of is the Art Cinema, in Hartford.
Gonzalez repeated several times over the course of the interview that he personally doesn’t like porno movies. His favorite “regular” movie? Probably the 1980 family drama Ordinary People with Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore. He and his partner still go to the movies every Tuesday night — not to the Fairmount, but to a regular cinema closer to their home in Wallingford. They had seen Greta Gerwig’s Barbie the night before. Gonzalez was still mulling over how surprisingly thoughtful he found the movie was about “how women are treated” in a male-dominated society. “That was a great movie,” he said.
In the parking lot outside of the theater, this reporter saw one older man in the driver’s seat of his car, the front door open. When he got up his pants’ zipper was down.
An older trans woman in a shoulder-length wig with a blind cane walked up the ramp, pulled off her leather shorts, and, wearing just a pair of stockings around her legs, walked through the theater’s side door.
One man — in his early 50s — stopped briefly in the parking lot to talk to this reporter as he made his way from his car to the theater’s entrance.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” he said when asked why he had come to the Fairmount early on a Wednesday afternoon. “I’m just going to use the restroom and will probably leave.”
All I can do is chuckle at the reporter doing this investigative piece. The clean up alone to decontaminate the biological waste would be expensive. I hope the reporter cleaned the bottom of his shoes after leaving that establishment. On a serious note, what price is he looking for? This place could be cleaned up and reset to be a neighborhood theater. It would be a hit.