Charlie Sheen Reclaims His Viral “Bi-Winning” Line With A Bisexual Twist

Charlie Sheen is no stranger to making shocking headlines. While his past antics have largely been scandalous or chaos-mongering, his latest revelation is a little different. For the first time, the 60-year-old actor is admitting that he’s had sex with men.

The disclosures come in his new memoir, The Book of Sheen, as well as in the Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen, and they date back to his crack-fueled years when, as he describes it, the drug “flipped the menu” and opened him up to new possibilities. But what’s less noteworthy than the fact that it happened is the way that he describes it now. “Some of it was weird. A lot of it was f—ing fun. And life goes on.”

For years, male bisexuality has been erased or lampooned, so the fact that Sheen, a man who was defined by excess and hyper-masculine bravado, is able to say, simply and without fanfare, “yeah, I’ve been with men, and so what?” feels revolutionary in its own way. The documentary in particular hammers this point home in a moment that could have easily been played for grander spectacle but isn’t. When asked how it feels to finally say it out loud, Sheen just smiles. “Liberating.” He jokes that no piano fell out of the sky, no train came through the wall, the world didn’t end. In that shrug, there’s something radical. He normalizes what so many men still feel like they must hide: that sexuality is fluid, complicated, and need not always be neatly categorized.

During this all, Sheen does not erase the role that drugs played. By his own account, crack was a “super-sexual” drug that broke down barriers and pushed him into situations he never thought he’d find himself in. His key message though is sobriety has not turned those memories into shame. He neither regrets them nor does he deny them. Instead, he reframes them as part of his life, part of his pleasure, and part of who he is. Even more so, it matters that it’s Charlie Sheen saying all this.

Sheen is sober, single, and quieter than he’s ever been at 60. His romantic life, he tells the doc, is uneventful. His willingness to openly and honestly talk about his bisexual past, without regret and without shame, lands like a cultural breakthrough. For all of the headlines about his addictions, his meltdowns, his HIV diagnosis, the one that may matter most is this. In a culture that is still too often inattentive or downright hostile when it comes to bisexual men’s visibility, that is not just a personal admission. That is what I call redefining bi-winning.