I know this is hardly news. But Charlie Sheen just isn’t making any sense at all. The 50-year-old actor this week confirmed rumours that he is HIV positive. He was diagnosed about four years ago. He says he doesn’t know how or when he got the virus. He also says it’s “impossible” that he infected anyone. How can that be? How can you pick up a disease transmitted by the exchange of bodily fluids so casually that you don’t know where or when, yet be quite so certain at the same time that no one picked it up from you in turn?
Sheen says that after diagnosis he told all of his sexual partners about his HIV status. There were, he says, about 5,000. Some of them, he says, betrayed his trust and blackmailed him. He seems particularly annoyed with one prostitute who took a photograph of his medication and threatened to take it to the media.
There are those who might consider it very naive for a very rich, very famous man to have expected so many people who were willing to do quite controversial things for money all to have resisted temptation. Since the number of blackmailers seems relatively small, one can only deduce that there are an awful lot of decent and honourable sex workers out there.
Though Sheen deduces something else. What the blackmailers don’t seem to understand, says Sheen, is that they’re taking money from his five children. By that standard, they were all surely taking money from Sheen’s children – all the sex workers, all the dealers, all the barmen, every time he bought something from them. Sheen’s sentiment about his precious fatherhood, which seems to consist of everyone in the world putting his children first except him, is repulsive.
It’s impossible not to feel sorry for Sheen. He’s clearly a very messed-up man. People tell good stories about his time in recovery, when he helped others to get off drink and drugs. The actor Tom Sizemore told Vanity Fair a few years ago about Sheen going to extraordinary lengths to get him cleaned up. Like many addicts, Sheen fits the Jekyll-and-Hyde bill.
It was awful and appalling, in 2011, when the media, mainstream and social, lapped up so voraciously Sheen’s extravagant breakdown, which he now hints had been in part a reaction to the news about his health. It would certainly suggest that Sheen’s claim to have “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA” was wishful thinking. But that doesn’t quite make narrative sense either, as the two women living with him at that time as his “goddesses”, say that he certainly hadn’t told them. (Neither are HIV positive.)
It’s awful too, of course, that Sheen has HIV and has been blackmailed because of it. But what’s not possible, for me anyway, is to now do as kinder folk are suggesting and laud him as a brave fighter against the stigma of HIV. This, too, is wishful thinking. Sheen has clearly revealed his secret simply because he felt forced to, both by rumour and by blackmail. There was absolutely nothing else that Sheen could have done, under the circumstances, except make an announcement himself before someone else did it for him, probably in a court of law.
It’s absolutely wrong that people should be condemned or stimgatised because they have HIV. But it’s also absolutely wrong that the danger of picking up HIV from reckless drug use or reckless sexual conduct should be glossed over in favour of sentimental projection on to a man who seems utterly unable to take responsibility for his own actions.
Certainly, Sheen’s conduct is likely to fuel the prejudice of those who prefer to think that people with HIV or Aids have “brought it on themselves” or “deserve what they get”. Ignorance and harsh judgment are still rampant.
I absolutely understand the temptation to try to counter this ghastly stuff by flattering and lionising Sheen. But there is no guarantee that Sheen is up to the job of advocating for people with HIV with much wisdom. It’s ill-advised to set a man as unpredictable as Sheen up as a hero, a spokesman or an archetype. He might manage to work things out and become an admirable ambassador for this still-fraught issue. It’s possible. But it cannot be counted on. He needs to develop some honest insight into himself before that can be achieved.
What I see when I take a peek at Sheen is a man who uses his sexual partners to boost his own delusional and narcissistic self-image. Some longer-term former partners allege that he was violent towards them, which suggests that the strategy breaks down when Sheen is expected to be part of an actual give-and-take relationship.
Sheen seems to be absolutely the opposite of a brave person. He seems like a self-absorbed, frightened wreck. Until he stands up and says: “My name is Charlie Sheen and I am not just an addict, but also a misogynistic parasite and asshole”, I won’t believe he’s capable of saying a single word about anything that’s worth hearing, least of all on a subject as sensitive as HIV and Aids.
