"Levi Johnston (the father of Bristol Palin’s baby boy Tripp) is a very interesting person who has been thrown under the bus," says Rex Lamont Butler, the Anchorage attorney who has befriended the young Alaskan, so much in the news.

Levi, ousted from the Palin inner circle, barely allowed to see his baby boy and unable to work at anything but bear hunting because of his Palin post-election notoriety, is presented as a nice guy by writer John Jeremiah Sullivan in the July issue of GQ magazine. He is depicted as a diamond in the rough, seriously homophobic, but a young stud done wrong by circumstance.

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If you don’t have access to GQ and if the Palin story is still fascinating to you, just try a few of reporter Sullivan’s quotes herein. He describes Wasilla like so:

It is a shithole surrounded by such loveliness … You can feel the Palins. From my budget hotel on Lake Lucille, I can see the big wooden wall that surrounds their house and a roof beyond it. They are of this place, they belong here, but their power has disturbed an equilibrium. At the gun shop, where the owners have known the family forever, the men at the counter say they believe deep down that when she puts her head on her pillow at night, she (Sarah Palin) wishes she had never said yes to McCain. It’s a remark made with some sadness, sure … She is a great American frontier story. Maybe that was as hard for you as it was for me to see, when we were so busy hoping she would win or lose. But the historical demi-urge that spoke through Sarah Palin is one that has cyclically made and remade this country … Levi is a mushroom growing in the shadow of that story.

Reporter Sullivan is a patient, good reporter who can really write. And GQ’s editors gave him his head in creating the various ideas and details of this amazing article, written while he toughed it out waiting for an interview in Alaska. I urge you to put your hands on the entire thing and read it from the beginning.

Sullivan writes that there are two takes on the Bristol-Levi story in Alaska: "One was the ‘under the bus narrative,’ held by the Levi camp … Levi loves girl, she gets pregnant, he gives up high school and hockey so he can provide for her and the baby. When it suits their political purposes, the family embraces him and essentially puts him forward as a son-in-law. When his meager political value is spent, they do what most normal parents would do and discourage the daughter from marrying him, in hopes she can get back on with her future. He’s frozen out of the family."

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Sullivan also implies that the drug bust of Levi’s mother simply "follows a recognizable course of small-town values." Was she set up by the Secret Service and busted for selling "a handful of OxyContin?" Your sympathy shifts to Levi and his mom. But you need to read the entire article in GQ and draw your own conclusion. The reporter asks Levi if it pisses him off that he changed his whole life and now they’ve shut him out. "He put down his glass of Coca-Cola and said, ‘Yes.’"

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Looking at the July GQ, which boasts what the magazine calls "our first nude cover," one is struck by the beauty of a nakedly posed Sacha Baron Cohen. He has been polished, powdered, shaved and made up to resemble the gay Austrian fashionista who is his own latest satirical invention, Bruno. (Serious gay people won’t appreciate this absurd character but others will relish the joke being played on a subculture.)


Image: GQ

If Levi Johnston of the Sarah Palin story is as homophobic as his reporter says he is, this cover couldn’t make the brave young bear hunter happy, because there he is, between the same covers with a swishy Sacha.