Adult Movie Theatres in New Haven

What is still open

Also in the county and worth naming so you do not drive to one by mistake. VIP Very Intimate Pleasures at 170 Boston Post Road in Orange has thirty-nine reviews, trades until midnight and calls itself New England’s mega romantic boutique. It is a shop, and so is Everything Adult Boutique in West Haven, under new owners and well liked. The other Connecticut rooms are in Hartford and Bridgeport.

Somebody asked this yesterday

On 24 October 2026, a man in Hartford put four questions in the review box on the Fairmount’s listing, because there was nowhere else to put them. He had never been. He had rung the number and got a machine.

He is asking a stranger on a shopping website whether a cinema forty miles away still exists, and he is doing it in the one place on the internet where that question is visible to anybody. This is the fourth city running where we have found somebody doing exactly that.

If you are him, or somebody like him: it is open as far as anybody can tell, fifteen dollars, cash, bring it with you. Go in the side. And if you want the thing you are actually going for, which is people, the mornings and after five are the times to go.

I had no one to talk to

In August 2023 Thomas Breen of the New Haven Independent went down to the Annex and spent half an hour with the man who owns the Fairmount. It is the best piece of reporting we have found on any venue in this directory, and what came out of it is not what you would expect.

Gilberto Gonzalez Jr. is sixty-three. Born in Meriden to Puerto Rican parents, living in Wallingford. He bought the cinema in 2010 after working for a private booth business up in Manchester, with help from a contact of his brother’s. He is there nearly every day. There are four people on the staff and he is one of them.

He told the paper he does not know how the place is surviving, because it is not making money. He was shut for a year at the start of the pandemic, could not get federal loans, and is still catching up on the bills. He would like to put a barber shop and a private gym in it and bring it back, and the banks will not lend to an adult cinema. He has been trying to sell since 2023 and nobody has come.

Then Breen asked him why he keeps it, and he said two things.

I’m gay. I had no one to talk to.

For me, I’m looking for a safe haven.

He does not watch the films. He says he would rather read books and magazines, and that he will not play anything abusive to women. He goes to ordinary cinemas with his partner, and he told a reporter he thought Barbie was thoughtful about how women get treated.

His customers, as he describes them, are lonely men of an older generation. Some live with their grown children. Some are married. Some are trans. Some are homeless. Most would not put a word to their sexuality. They drive in from Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, because there is almost nowhere else left.

And here is the line in that article that we cannot get past. Six men came in during the half hour Breen was there. They moved between the rooms. They hardly spoke to one another.

A man bought a pornographic cinema because he had nobody to talk to, and he has spent fifteen years keeping a room open for other men who have nobody to talk to, and they go in and they do not talk to each other either. Outside, a man in his early fifties on his way in was asked why he was going. He said he did not really want to talk about it.

Ten dollars for women

The Fairmount charges women ten dollars on a weekday and men fifteen. In April of this year a customer from East Haven left a short review asking for the place to be cleaned up and modernised, and gave his reason: to attract girls, ladies.

Put that next to Stockton, where the owner of a shop with an arcade said six years ago that he does not generally allow women in the back, for obvious reasons, and has not answered the woman who asked a year ago whether that had changed.

Same trade, same decade, two owners, opposite answers. One prices women in at a third off. The other keeps them out and will not say why. Nothing in any statute requires either position, which means both of them are just a man deciding.

The question most of us are not asking

Something happens on the Milford listing that we have not seen anywhere else on this site, and after the last few cities it is almost startling.

Somebody asked, ten months ago, in these words: the question most of us are not asking is, what is the masturbation policy there. And another customer answered him. The policy is basically whatever happens, happens. Watch or join, to each their own.

Somebody else asked whether you can have sex with a friend there. Another customer answered that one too. It has happened a few times.

Compare that with the silence everywhere else. In Columbia three people asked after a theatre across three years and got nothing. In Stockton the owner answers what size the toys are and goes quiet on the room. At Pompano Beach a manager will give you the busiest hours for the booths and has left four questions about gloryholes untouched.

Nobody official answered in Milford either. The operators are as quiet here as anywhere. What is different is that the customers answered each other, plainly and without making a joke of it, and that phrase, the question most of us are not asking, is the most honest sentence in this whole directory.

The booths lost in court. The cinema was never in it.

Connecticut fought this out once, at the federal appeals court, and the booths lost.

In 1990, in Singer v. Town of East Hartford, the people behind two adult bookshops took the town to the Second Circuit over one line in a new ordinance. East Hartford had banned video booths from being closed off or hidden from view from the common areas of the shop. No doors, no curtains, nothing between the booth and the aisle. They argued it was a First Amendment problem. The court affirmed the ruling below in a short per curiam opinion and the rule stood.

That is one town’s ordinance, not Connecticut law, and it does not reach New Haven. But it is the instrument that shows up over and over on this site under different names: an open booth is a booth nobody uses. Toledo cut the doors down. Colorado Springs wants a clear line of sight from the counter. Bakersfield’s booths have no doors at all.

And none of it touches a cinema. A room with rows of seats and a screen was never what those rules were written about. Whatever else has gone wrong for the Fairmount, and by its owner’s account nearly everything has, the thing that shut the arcades was not aimed at it.

We are not saying that is why it survived. Nobody has written that down and we would be inventing a cause. What we can say is that the last room standing in this part of Connecticut is the one shape of room that the open-booth rules were never written for.