Charlie Sheen says he had gay sex like 'Richard Pryor and Marlon Brando'

After decades of hiding, actor Charlie Sheen is talking openly about his history of sleeping with men, comparing his experience to other famous male celebs.

The Two and a Half Men star finally opened up about his gay experiences last month in a cover story with People, and now he’s diving deeper in a new interview to promote his recently released two-part Netflix documentary and his memoir, The Book of Sheen.

In an interview with The Times, Sheen gets candid about his extreme drug use and struggles with addiction, and how that led him to sleeping with men.

The 60-year-old actor reveals he slept with men while using crack, and decided to finally come clean while making the documentary. “The director of the doc said, ‘I’ve done a deep-dive on your life and there are a ton of rumors about you and dudes.’ I’m like, ‘Fine, let’s talk about it.’ It seemed like the right time,” he said.

Sheen decided to confront this part of his past and openly discuss his encounters with men.

“I’ve experienced what it’s like to keep that stuff hidden, and always worry about the next phone call, the next knock on the door,” he admitted. “But I didn’t have any experience with, ‘What if it was out there?’”

But then Sheen takes the issue of feeling like he had to hide this part of himself away and turns it into a positive. “It gave me something else in common with Richard Pryor and Marlon Brando,” he said. “That’s pretty good company, right?”

Marlon Brando was bisexual and came out in the ‘70s when he told his biographer, Gary Carey, “Homosexuality is so much in fashion, it no longer makes news. Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed.”

Richard Pryor was also bisexual, and, in fact, Quincy Jones claimed that Brando and Pryor slept together, a rumor that Pryor’s widow Jennifer Lee confirmed.

Sheen also admitted that he was blackmailed repeatedly — including by someone he had to pay $1.4 million to keep quiet — by lovers who found out he was HIV+ and threatened to tell the press.

“I had to tell people in private. Then they would extort me with that information — take photos of my [HIV] meds while I was asleep. They would do all kinds of nefarious shit,” he said.

When he finally went public with his diagnosis in a TV interview in 2015, he said he could finally “breathe again.” Now, a decade later, he’s gotten another secret off his chest and explained that talking about having sex with men has “the same value as the HIV reveal in 2015.”