Key Points
Charlie Sheen clarified comments he made in a recent memoir and docuseries about sexual encounters he has had in the past with men.
Sheen said that those encounters weren’t as “graphic” as people may now think: “It wasn’t full-fledged.”
But Sheen insisted that his desire to clear the air around his sexual habits during a particularly turbulent time in his life is “not a shame thing.”
Charlie Sheen wants to set the record straight, so to speak.
Among the biggest revelations from last month’s release of his memoir, The Book of Sheen, and Netflix docuseries, aka Charlie Sheen, was his detailing of sexual encounters he’s had with men. Sheen’s characteristically candid disclosure generated a plenty of discussion, which he now believes has led to a widespread misperception.
“When people say ‘sex with men,’ you immediately think of, like, butt sex. Sorry to be graphic, but that’s kind of where the mind goes, right?” Sheen explained on Wednesday’s episode of In Depth with Grant Bensinger. But “it wasn’t that.”
Courtesy of Netflix
Archival shot of Charlie Sheen from ‘aka Charlie Sheen’
“I don’t want to be like, ‘Okay, I did this thing, but this and that part of it didn’t happen.’ But it didn’t.” Sheen continued. “I don’t know that that matters, but that’s the only part of it that I’m like, it wasn’t full-fledged, man… They say you experiment in college, you know? I never went to college, so maybe that explains it.”
Though Sheen sought to reframe the narrative around this particular stratum of his sex life, he made sure to be clear that he didn’t do so out of judgment or regret: “It’s not a shame thing. It’s just kind of like a, ‘Huh, [sex with men] is a bit of a broad category.'”
At the time of the memoir and docuseries’ release, Sheen characterized finally going public with the details of the encounters as “liberating. It’s f—ing liberating … [to] just talk about stuff. 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… I’m not going to run from my past, or let it own me.”
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Sheen emerged as a star in the mid-1980s after a string of roles in successful films like Platoon and Wall Street. Following in the footsteps of his father, Martin Sheen, the actor segued into television, where he found firm footing on sitcoms like Spin City and Two and a Half Men.
The actor had previously been public about his substance abuse issues and penchant for partying going back to the 1990s, but his being terminated from Two and a Half Men in 2011 following an unsuccessful contract negotiation and a stint in a substance rehabilitation program brought his personal issues to the forefront of public conversation. That year, Sheen was diagnosed as HIV positive, which he revealed in 2015.
Now in his transparency and accountability era, Sheen is even trying to reconnect with the family he left behind on Two and a Half Men, revealing in aka Charlie Sheen that he’s reached out to costar Jon Cryer to get conversations going again.
You can watch Sheen’s full interview on In Depth with Grant Bensinger above.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly