Geneva Newsmakers of 2012—No. 8: Todd Searcy

Part 3 of a series: Geneva Patch takes a look at 10 people who played key roles in the top stories of 2012, culminating with the announcement of Geneva Patch's 2012 "Person of the Year."

  Todd Searcy made a lot of headlines as a football player at Geneva High School in the early '80s and more still as a linebacker for the University of Illinois Fighting Illini. But the headlines he made in 2012 weren't about the battles in the backfield or on the line of scrimmage. They were about the hard struggles of being a gay athlete growing up in Geneva, his life-and-death battle against AIDS-related illnesses and his day-to-day challenges with serious, ongoing health issues. In 2010, Searcy was named to the Geneva High School Athletic Hall of Fame. Two years later, he made the courageous decision to tell his story to freelance writer Martha Quetsch, who wrote a three-part series of stories, published on Geneva Patch, called "A Gay …

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