Charlie Sheen is opening up about his past by getting candid about past sexual experiences with men.

The actor revealed all in two upcoming new projects — his memoir The Book of Sheen, due Sept. 9, and the Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen,  to be released on Sept. 1.

He admitted that after years of having sex with women, he decided to try something new.

He says he’s no longer hiding from his past, but owning it.

“I’m not going to run from my past, or let it own me,” he tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story.

In the documentary when the interviewer asks Sheen how it feels to be talking publicly for the first time about having sex with men, he says, “Liberating. It’s f***ing liberating… [to] just talk about stuff. It’s like a train didn’t come through the side of the restaurant. A f***ing piano didn’t fall out of the sky. No one ran into the room and shot me.”

Sheen, who also spoke about the subject Friday, September 5, on Good Morning America, says his sexual experiences with men began when he was using crack.

“That’s what started it,” he says. “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.”

During his drug-fueled exploits, Sheen contracted HIV, which he tried to keep private. However, some of his overnight guests would see his medication, take photos of it and then threaten to expose Sheen if he didn’t pay them. He paid them in the beginning, but then came out with his HIV status in 2015 on the Today show.

“I do know for a fact that I never passed it on,” he says of the virus.

Sheen says with the book and the documentary he just wanted to tell his full truth and own his stories, and he didn’t want to censor anything.

“The stories I can remember anyway,” he jokes. While he says he spent the past eight years making amends to people he’d hurt while he was spiraling with his drug and alcohol addiction, he doesn’t want to play the victim in the book or the doc.

“It takes two to tango,” he says.

These days, Sheen lives a much quieter lifestyle out of the spotlight, and he says he’s been single for years, after going through two very tumultuous divorces, with his exes Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller.

“My romantic life is as uneventful as it possibly could be, and it’s been that way for a long time,” he says.

He adds, “But I am open to love again. Probably not marriage, though!”