Two and a Half Men star Charlie Sheen opens up about same-sex encounters: ‘It was fun’

Charlie Sheen, the Golden Globe-winning star of Two and a Half Men has spoken about having sexual encounters with men for the first time.

This month, the actor releases his memoir The Book of Sheen and Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen, in which he reveals that he began having sex with men while taking crack.  

“That’s where it was born, or sparked,” he told PEOPLE. “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 f***ing fun, and life goes on.”

The star, who has largely stepped from the spotlight since getting sober in 2017, described revealing his same-sex experiences as “f**king liberating”.

“It’s like a train didn’t come through the side of the restaurant. A f***ing piano didn’t fall out of the sky. No one ran into the room and shot me,” he said. “I’m not going to run from my past or let it own me.”

The 60-year-old also spoke to Good Morning America host Michael Strahan about the revelations, stating that he needed “to be free” of his secrets.

In his memoir, Sheen reveals that he was diagnosed with HIV in 2011, but kept quiet about his diagnosis because some of the people he had slept with would take photos of his medication, and threaten to expose him if he didn’t pay them off.

He revealed publicly that he was HIV positive in 2015.

“It did come with a tremendous amount of extortion,” Sheen told Strahan.

“And so at the time, I was just like, ‘Alright, let’s just pay to keep it quiet. And just hope it just stays over there, make it go away, you know? Make it go away.'”

Now, he said, his romantic life is “as uneventful as it possibly could be” but that he is “open to love again”.

Sheen was one of the most watched actors of the 2000s, securing multiple Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG award nominations for his role as Charlie Harper in CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men. 

Yet his TV career was derailed in 2011 after he was sacked by the show due to his issues with substance addiction. He also became known for his controversial opinions on vaccinations and what happened during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, plus his marital issues with actress Denise Richards.

The Book of Sheen is released on 9 September, and aka Charlie Sheen arrives on Netflix on 10 September.

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