In his new memoir, The Book of Sheen, and his upcoming Netflix documentary, aka Charlie Sheen, 60-year-old actor Charlie Sheen revealed that he's previously had sexual experiences with men.
As reported by People, Sheen gets candid about being intimately involved with men in both of the memoir and documentary. "I flipped the menu," he said, noting that he sought something new in his sex life. "I'm not going to run from my past, or let it own me," he told People.
At one point in the documentary, which is set to hit Netflix on September 10, Sheen said that he feels a sense of relief in opening up about it. "Liberating," he said when asked how it feels. "It's fucking liberating... [to] just talk about stuff. It's like a train didn't come through the side of the restaurant. A fucking piano didn't fall out of the sky. No one ran into the room and shot me."
During an interview on Good Morning America, he was asked why he kept his sexual experiences with men secret for so long, despite being open about the rest of his sex life. "There was another element to it... It did come with a tremendous amount of extortion," he said. "So at the time, I was just like, 'All right, let's just pay to keep it quiet.' ... Make it go away, you know, just make it go away."
He also addressed his decision to go public with his HIV positive diagnosis in 2015. "That was a tremendous relief," he said. "That felt like... 'Now I can focus on some other things.'" He said that he's now been sober for almost eight years.
Speaking with People, he said that his sexual experiences with men started when he was smoking crack. "That's what started it," he added. "That's where it was born, or sparked. And in whatever chunks of time that I was off the pipe, trying to navigate that, trying to come to terms with it—'Where did that come from?... Why did that happen?'—and then just finally being like, 'So what?' So what? Some of it was weird. A lot of it was fucking fun, and life goes on."
He also maintained that he knows "for a fact" that he never passed HIV on to another sexual partner. In 2022, he settled a lawsuit in which one of his ex-girlfriends accused him of exposing her to HIV in 2017. He also said that his romantic life these days is "as uneventful as it possibly could be," but he's "open to love again."
ComplexCon returns to Las Vegas on October 25–26, 2025, with over 300 brands and live performances by Young Thug, YEAT & Friends, Peso Pluma, Central Cee, Ken Carson, and more. Get your tickets now.