Charlie Sheen Reveals He's Had Sex With Men

Charlie Sheen is opening up about his past sexual encounters with other men ... and he says it's "liberating" to tell his story.

In an upcoming Netflix documentary about his life, Charlie says he decided to try something new and he started having sex with men after years of banging women.

According to People, Charlie explains it like this in the doc ... "I flipped the menu over." The interviewer then asks Charlie how it feels to talk publicly about having sex with men for the first time, and he responds, "Liberating. It's f***ing liberating."

Charlie claims he started having sex with men when he was in the throes of drug addiction ... namely, when he was smoking crack.

He says his crack use "started it ... That's where it was born, or sparked. And in whatever chunks of time that I was off the pipe, trying to navigate that, trying to come to terms with it -- 'Where did that come from? ... Why did that happen? -- and then just finally being like, 'So what?' So what? Some of it was weird. A lot of it was f***ing fun, and life goes on."

Charlie also told Michael Strahan on "Good Morning America" he was a sex addict at the time ... and he kept his trysts with men secret because he was being extorted, and he felt it was easier to pay to keep it quiet in the hopes it eventually went away. After a while, he says he felt like he was being held hostage.

At some point during his drug-fueled sex romps, Charlie contracted HIV ... and in 2015 he went public with his diagnosis in an interview on the "Today" show. He says he stopped using drugs in 2015 and has been completely sober for 8 years.