Bruce Bastian, one of the founders of WordPerfect, has died at the age of 76

Bruce Bastian, founder of WordPerfect Corporation, whose word processor was the preferred writing tool in the early days of personal computers — and who later, after coming out as gay, renounced his Mormon faith and funded LGBTQ causes — died June 16 at his home in Palm Springs, California. He was 76.

Michael Marriott, executive director of the BW Bastian Foundation, said the cause was complications of pulmonary fibrosis.

Mr. Bastian was completing his graduate studies at Brigham Young University in the late 1970s when he founded the company that later became WordPerfect with Alan C. Ashton, his computer science professor and grandson of David O. McKay, the influential former president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Bastian and Ashton pioneered the development of more productive computers for everyday tasks. Years later, they became opponents in the legal battle over gay marriage.

Highly customizable and with a free customer support line, WordPerfect has emerged as the first choice of new PC users in a crowded market of up-and-coming word processors. (Among its fans was Philip Roth, who used it until his retirement in 2012, long after the program had been surpassed in popularity by Microsoft Word.)

“WordPerfect had a reputation for being very user-friendly,” said Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor at the University of Maryland and author of “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing” (2016), in an interview. “It was clean and modern. Most of the screen was devoted to the document you were writing, as opposed to a lot of menus and the apparatus of the software.”

Bastian wrote much of the software code. Ashton was in charge of the business side. By 1991, the company controlled 50 percent of the word processing market and had revenues of over $500 million. It employed over 4,000 people, most of them at the company’s headquarters in Orem, Utah – hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley.

“In a world where Silicon Valley companies are thriving, WordPerfect Corp. is a bit of an oddball,” Personal Computing magazine wrote in a 1988 cover article about the company. “At 4,000 feet above sea level, Utah’s Great Basin is not exactly a high-tech headquarters. The air in Orem is dry in December, the snow that falls on the Wasatch Front east of Salt Lake City is the powdery snow that pro skiers crave.”

The location of the company was not the only curiosity.

“There’s something else that sets this high-tech company apart from most others,” the magazine noted. “Like two-thirds of Utah’s population, most of WordPerfect’s employees are Mormons.”

This included the two founders – one of them had a secret that tormented him.

In 1976, Bastian married his best friend Melanie Laycock. They had four sons. But Bastian always knew that he was gay, he later said in interviews.

At some point in the late 1980s, he kissed another man while on a business trip in Amsterdam.

“When I came back to Utah, I was completely devastated,” Bastian said in an interview with Outwords, an organization that records oral histories of the LGBTQ movement. “It was so transformative and so difficult. I walk in the door and see my little boys and I’m like, ‘Oh, my goodness. What am I going to do?'”

A few days later he told his wife.

“We tried to make it work,” he told Outwords. “I tried to be gay and Mormon at the same time. It’s impossible.”

A few years later, Bastian came out publicly and had his name removed from the Mormon Church’s records. He received anonymous emails from people expressing disgust at his sexuality. Nevertheless, he felt liberated.

“It was such a relief to actually not have to lie anymore,” he said on the podcast “Mormon Stories.”

But problems were brewing in the WordPerfect business.

The company’s software dominated the market for computers running the MS-DOS operating system, but was slow to release a version for the new Microsoft Windows platform. Microsoft also integrated Word into its Microsoft Office productivity suite, which quickly cost WordPerfect market share.

In 1994, Bastian and Ashton sold their private company to Novell for $1.4 billion. Novell later sold the software to Corel, which is now known as Alludo. WordPerfect still has a loyal following in the legal community.

Mr. Bastian left the company after the announcement of the sale to Novell. Through his foundation, he became a major philanthropist, funding arts and cultural programs throughout Utah. He also supported LGBTQ causes and became a member of the board of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group.

In 2008, the Mormon Church asked its members to financially support the passage of Proposition 8, a ballot law in California that banned same-sex marriage. Mr. Ashton donated $1 million.

“I wanted to make sure my children and grandchildren had a good future,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune. “That’s why I donated.”

Mr. Bastian donated one million dollars to the opposition efforts.

He said the incident made him feel betrayed by Ashton. He told The Tribune it was “really painful for me.”

Bruce Wayne Bastian was born on March 23, 1948, in Twin Falls, Idaho. His father, Arlon, owned a grocery store and a farm and was also a musician. His mother, Una (Davis) Bastian, ran the household.

He studied music education at Brigham Young University, graduating in 1975. He directed the university’s marching band and co-wrote a program for choreographing performances with Mr. Ashton. He received his master’s degree in computer science in 1978.

In 1985, the local company’s success was featured in the Orem-Geneva Times.

“It is hard to believe,” the newspaper wrote, “that a company with such humble beginnings could become one of the biggest competitors (if not the biggest) in the microcomputer word processing industry.”

Mr. Bastian and his wife divorced in 1993. She died in 2016.

He married Clint Ford in 2018.

Mr. Ford is survived by his sons Rick, Darren, Jeff and Robert; two sisters, Camille Cox and Marietta Peterson; a brother, Reese Bastian; and 14 grandchildren.

For Mr Bastian, coming out was frightening and hopeful at the same time.

“I don’t think heterosexuals can imagine the inner turmoil and fear at this moment in the life of a homosexual,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune. “All your dreams, plans, everything is falling apart. The whole foundation of your life is crumbling. You can stay the course or follow your heart and go where every human being wants to go – to eternal happiness.”