Statue of Bill McCartney, the title-winning coach who called homosexuality an “abomination,” is dividing CU

A towering statue of former Buffs football coach Bill McCartney — revered by some as their beloved “Coach Mac” and by others as a man who condemned same-sex marriage — will become a fixture at Folsom Field this fall, dividing the University of Colorado community over whom the Boulder campus chooses to commemorate and how.

University officials say the statue, funded by private donors, is intended to celebrate McCartney’s record on the field, the high mark of which came in 1990 when McCartney led the football team to the only national championship in the school’s history. 

But members of the LGBTQ+ community, including CU Boulder alumni, have brought concerns to university leaders about the legacy McCartney established outside athletics as someone who became a well-known, vocal crusader against people who identify as queer. With their sense of belonging on campus at stake, they want the university to rethink how to preserve complicated figures and chapters of its past.

McCartney, who died in January at age 84, founded a men’s Christian organization called the Promise Keepers that has long openly opposed gay marriage. While overseeing the organization, McCartney labeled homosexuality “an abomination against almighty God” during a speech he delivered at CU in 1992, the Boulder Daily Camera reported.

A statue of McCartney “would paint a stain on the CU Boulder campus,” said Marco Dorado, a gay man who graduated from the university in 2014 and now struggles to “disentangle the coach’s accomplishments from his personally held views and actions.”

“Are we memorializing someone who shared such vile and hateful views toward a significant chunk of the student and alumni population?” Dorado said during an interview with The Colorado Sun. “It’s not just that his views were hateful and he expressed those views. He then created this whole infrastructure through the Promise Keepers and did advocacy calling members of the community (an) abomination.”

University spokesperson Deborah Méndez-Wilson declined a request for an interview with Chancellor Justin Schwartz but provided a statement emphasizing that the statue is “a fully donor-funded project recognizing his accomplishments during the 12 years he served as CU’s football coach.”

“The statue commemorates his football legacy and is the culmination of two years of planning and fundraising efforts,” the statement read. “Coach McCartney understood that the statement he made more than 30 years ago on LGBTQ rights was wrong, and he subsequently apologized publicly.”

The Boulder Daily Camera reported in 2010, when CU Boulder was considering bringing McCartney back to coach the Buffs, that he “apologized for offending anyone in the past and for not effectively communicating.”

The Boulder Daily Camera quoted McCartney saying, “The Bible says the whole gospel is found in the first two commandments, and those commandments are love God and love your neighbor as yourself. What I regret is that I did not communicate that. I don’t judge the gay community, and anybody who gets the impression that I do, that’s just not the truth. I didn’t communicate that well that day, and I regret that. I ask the forgiveness of anyone who thinks I judged them or look down on them. I don’t.”

“I regret that I gave the impression that I would in any way judge somebody else; I don’t,” McCartney said. “I don’t judge anybody. But I can see how that was interpreted, and I’m sorry for that.”

Not everyone is convinced that was a genuine apology.

“He really just dances around it,” Mardi Moore, CEO of Boulder nonprofit Rocky Mountain Equality and an outspoken opponent of the statue, told The Sun. “I am not a cancel-culture person. I don’t live in that world. I make mistakes. We all make mistakes. This was not a mistake. This was an effort on his behalf to remove us from civil society.”

“Every period with its glories has its blemishes as well”

A separate statement provided by the University of Colorado Board of Regents claims that the board has no decision-making authority over placing the statue on campus.

“We all agree that Bill McCartney had extraordinary success on the football field,” noted the statement, emailed to The Sun by chair Callie Rennison. “We also agree that Coach McCartney’s full legacy is viewed very passionately and very differently by many. Among the Regents our own opinions vary greatly. Many of us have shared our thoughts as well as the community outreach we have received with campus leadership. We understand that the current decision regarding the statue was made prior to the current chancellor’s arrival and fundraising has already occurred. We also all understand that under current policy, the decisions surrounding this statue are not ours to make.”

Multiple regents, including Rennison, declined an interview with The Sun or did not respond to requests for an interview.

Regent Mark VanDriel, who represents Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, told The Sun he appreciates hearing from individuals concerned about the statue and hopes the CU System “can find ways to add their understanding to our campus’ history.”

VanDriel, a historian, said he isn’t intimately familiar with McCartney’s life and he sees the statue as a portal for the university and generations to learn about and reckon with its past.

“If my understanding of what happened is correct, it might send the message that 30 to 40 years ago, LGBT students weren’t welcome on our campus,” he said. “And I will say I actually think it’s kind of important to send that message. Reconciling with our history matters quite a bit. I understand that it can be frustrating to a lot of people to acknowledge that they weren’t welcomed before, but if that’s the truth of our history, I think it’s more important to understand that and to recognize that and to grapple with that than it is to pretend that those periods didn’t happen and that there weren’t other accomplishments during those periods.”

VanDriel said that he does not believe commemorating McCartney should undermine the sense of belonging queer people feel on campus today.

“I don’t think that it tells us who we are,” he said. “It tells us who we’ve been. Every period with its glories has its blemishes as well,” VanDriel added.

Exactly when and where CU Boulder will plant the statue of McCartney on campus has yet to be determined. The university plans to display the statue somewhere near Folsom Field with hopes to have it in place before a home football game in the fall.

The 8.5-foot-tall bronze statue, which comes with a price tag of about $275,000, is currently under construction by Hanlon Sculpture Studio, the same company that designed and built the statue depicting the school’s bison mascot Ralphie and her handlers sitting in front of the Champions Center.

University officials say the statue was the idea of a couple of former CU football players coached by McCartney and funding for the statue has come entirely from former CU athletes and others who played for and worked with McCartney, though no names have been released.

Enshrining McCartney in the form of a statue falls at a time uncertainty for queer communities across the country is escalating — as policies at the federal level and laws and proposed legislation across states take direct aim at scaling back protections for transgender people and as President Donald Trump tries to squash diversity, equity and inclusion efforts like those at higher education institutions.

Colorado has taken its own steps to affirm support of members of the LGBTQ+ community, most recently last November when voters decided to scrub the state constitution of a provision barring same-sex marriage.

This is not the first time a prominent piece of art has spurred controversy at CU. The fate of a sculpture marking a significant moment in the Chicano movement pitted students and administrators against one another in 2020, according to reporting by The Denver Post. The statue, a work of mosaic art known as “Los Seis,” illustrated six CU Boulder students and alumni killed by car bombs during a May 1974 campus protest decrying university cuts impacting Mexican-American students.

When university officials decided the statue would be temporary in 2020, students sprang into action, demonstrating on campus and demanding the statue remain permanent. Later that year, the university committed to keeping “Los Seis” in its original spot near the site of the 1974 student protests.

Prioritizing the interests of donors over students and alumni

Outrage over the statue of McCartney has so far not spurred any protests but has prompted alumni and queer residents and advocates to call on university leaders and regents to reconsider the statue altogether.

Mark Lester, a policy analyist for Rocky Mountain Equality who graduated from CU Boulder in December, asked the Board of Regents to consider alternative memorial ideas while testifying during a board meeting earlier this month. Lester, a trombone player in the Golden Buffalo Marching Band in college, remembers football games as a place where he felt united with his school and where he could fully express himself as an openly gay man.

A statue of McCartney would alienate the LGBTQ+ community and tarnish the sense of pride Lester carries for his alma mater.

“Walking on campus and seeing that the school is choosing to honor someone who directly fought against the reality that I live in today, which is living in a state that accepts me for who I am and honors my identity, the fact that they would put up a permanent memorial of someone who fought to make that reality impossible … I would be hurt by that quite frankly,” he said in an interview with The Sun. “And I think it’s important now more than ever given the attacks on LGBTQ+ identity that are happening in the federal government that people can walk onto places like the CU campus and know that they are going to be honored for who they are.”

Moore, of Rocky Mountain Equality, told The Sun the university’s commitment to the statue confounds her. CU Boulder has long been an involved partner for the nonprofit, which advocates for LGBTQ+ people and collaborates with other groups to create inclusive spaces. Rocky Mountain Equality has participated in university pride nights while the university has sponsored events for the nonprofit, Moore said.

The university’s decision to make it a permanent part of campus is one she said is in direct conflict with how inclusive CU has been for the LGBTQ+ community.

“It makes me sick to my stomach to think that CU Boulder would put up a statue for a man who created so much harm in the state of Colorado for gay and lesbian people,” Moore told The Sun, referencing McCartney’s support of Amendment 2. That measure, approved by voters in 1992, outlawed policies designed to safeguard gay people from discrimination and was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996.

Moore called CU Boulder’s statement “a pretty shallow response,” arguing that it doesn’t matter that the statue is privately funded since it will live on public grounds.

She added that the pain McCartney inflicted on the queer community in the 1990s remains fresh for longtime Boulder residents — almost as if he made his statements yesterday.

The pain feels equally raw for Dorado, the 2014 graduate, with the statue scraping open an old wound from his days on campus as a first-generation college student, undocumented at the time, and still not open about his sexuality.

When Dorado first learned the statue was in motion, he said he was immediately transported back in time to a moment when, as a student, he came across a “Confessions of CU Boulder” Facebook page asking “Why … are there so many little Mexican children in the library?”

The same tidal wave of emotions that overwhelmed him in that moment surged again: “I can work as hard as possible. I can be as involved as possible on this campus, but at the end of the day, I’m either not welcome here or I am not free to be my full self here.”

Dorado said he understands CU Boulder leaders’ intention to pay tribute to “the victories on the field.” But he and others in the LGBTQ+ community wonder if there is another way to memorialize the 1990 championship team, perhaps with a statue of the whole team or with a statue of McCartney in a more private spot on campus instead.

He also questions at what point the university is prioritizing the interests of donors over students and alumni.

“I think it’s really important to make sure that as they’re striving to make CU Boulder be an inclusive campus but also one that is a place where dialogue and an exchange of ideas can happen, that they be very careful to ensure that those ideas are not rooted in hate for one another,” he said, “because once we start to memorialize folks who have those ideas, it puts the university in a very dangerous position in my opinion to embrace and endorse them by erecting a statue.”