If it comes as a shock to anyone that at some point in the grip of a decades-long addiction to pills, booze and crack cocaine the essentially heterosexual Charlie Sheen occasionally “turned over the menu” and had sex with men, then I am delighted. I did not know such pockets of naivety could still exist in this benighted world. You sweet things. Enjoy your time!
That this is the fact that has made headlines (the few there have been) around the release of the two-part documentary AKA Charlie Sheen is testimony to how little new information there is in it. How, really, could it be otherwise? Every one of the three acts – which in the film he labels “Partying”, “Partying with problems” and “Just problems” – of his adult life has been comprehensively documented by the media in real time. Sometimes that was via stories sold by the people he partied with, sometimes via public hospitalisations and press conferences called by his father Martin Sheen to try to control the press interest. Sometimes it was thanks to Charlie’s own interviews or call-ins to the likes of Alex Jones’s Infowars shows, or ranting videos posted on YouTube about his “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA” done under the influence, or as a result of the drawn-out divorce proceedings between him and Denise Richards as his substance abuse made their life together untenable. And sometimes it was an amalgam, as when in 2015 he gave an exclusive interview to NBC’s Today show revealing his HIV+ status, to end various extortion attempts people had made over the four years since his diagnosis.
