Charlie Sheen Opens Up About Past Same-Sex Encounters in Netflix Doc

Charlie Sheen says he has for the first time publicly discussed past sexual encounters with men in a two-part Netflix documentary that begins streaming Sept. 10 and in a memoir published one day earlier. In interviews ahead of the premieres, the 60-year-old actor described the revelations as liberating and tied the encounters to a period of heavy drug use that also preceded a publicly disclosed HIV diagnosis.

"I flipped the menu over," Sheen says in the documentary, according to promotional clips released this week. "It’s fing liberating to just talk about stuff," he told People, and on Good Morning America he said those same-sex encounters "were born" when he was smoking crack. He added, "Some of it was weird. A lot of it was fing fun, and life goes on."

Sheen has previously said he learned he was HIV-positive years before going public in 2015, and he reiterated that disclosure came after a period of extortion and blackmail. He told interviewers he paid people who threatened to expose his diagnosis after seeing his medication, and he maintains he never transmitted the virus to another person.

The two-part documentary, aka Charlie Sheen, directed by Andrew Renzi, traces Sheen’s...