Bruce Bastian, a founder of the WordPerfect Corporation, whose word processor was the writing tool of choice in the early days of personal computing — 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, Calif. He was 76.
According to Michael Marriott, director of the BW Bastian Foundation, complications from pulmonary fibrosis were the cause.
Mr. Bastian was finishing his undergraduate studies at Brigham Young University in the late 1970s when he and 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, founded the company that would later become WordPerfect.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Mr. Bastian and Mr. Ashton were leaders in making computers more productive for everyday tasks. Years later, they became opponents in the legal battle over gay marriage.
Highly customizable and with a toll-free customer support line, WordPerfect emerged from a crowded market of emerging word processors and became the first choice for new PC users. (One of its fans was Philip Roth, who used the program until he retired in 2012, long after it had been eclipsed in popularity by Microsoft Word.)
“WordPerfect was known for its ease of use,” Matthew Kirschenbaum, a professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing” (2016), said 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 hardware of the software.”
Mr. Bastian wrote much of the software code. Mr. Ashton ran the business side. By 1991, the company controlled 50 percent of the word processing market and generated more than $500 million in revenue. It employed more than 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 thrive, WordPerfect Corp. is a bit of an odd duck,” Personal Computing magazine wrote in a 1988 cover story about the company. “At 4,000 feet above sea level, Utah's Great Basin is hardly 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 fluff that skiers crave.”
The company's location wasn't the only odd thing.
“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 was also true for both founders, one of whom carried a secret that tormented him.
In 1976, Mr. Bastian married his best friend, Melanie Laycock. They eventually had four sons. But all the time, he later told interviewers, Mr. Bastian knew he was gay.
Sometime in the late 1980s, during a business trip to Amsterdam, he kissed another man.
“When I got back to Utah, I was a mess,” Mr. Bastian said in an interview with Outwords, an organization that records oral histories of the LGBTQ movement. “It was just so transformative and so hard. I walk in the door and I see my little boys and I’m just like, ‘Oh my gosh. 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.”
Mr. Bastian came out publicly a few years later and removed his name from the Mormon Church records. He received anonymous emails from people expressing disgust at his sexuality. Still, he felt liberated.
“It was such a relief not having to lie anymore,” he said on the “Mormon Stories” podcast.
But problems began to arise in the WordPerfect sector.
The company's software dominated the market for computers running the MS-DOS operating system, but it was long before a version was released for the emerging Microsoft Windows platform. Microsoft also bundled Word into its productivity suite of programs, Microsoft Office, which quickly stole WordPerfect's market share.
In 1994, Mr. Bastian and Mr. Ashton sold their privately held 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 sale to Novell was announced. Through his foundation, he became a major philanthropist, funding arts and cultural programs throughout Utah. He also supported LGBTQ causes and joined the board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group.
In 2008, the Mormon Church urged its members to financially support the passage of Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have banned same-sex marriage. Mr. Ashton contributed $1 million.
“I wanted to make sure the future was good for my children and grandchildren,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. “That’s why I gave.”
Mr. Bastian contributed $1 million to the opposition.
The episode, he said, left him feeling betrayed by Mr. Ashton. It was, he told The Tribune, “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, was a homemaker.
He studied music education at Brigham Young University, graduating in 1975. He was the director of the university's marching band and co-wrote a program with Mr. Ashton that helped choreograph performances. He received his master's degree in computer science in 1978.
In 1985, The Orem-Geneva Times reported on the local company's success.
“It is hard to believe,” the newspaper wrote, “that a company with such modest beginnings could become one of the largest competitors (or even the largest) in the microcomputer word processing industry.”
Mr. Bastian and his wife divorced in 1993. She died in 2016.
In 2018, he married Clint Ford.
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 both scary and hopeful.
“I don't think straight people can imagine the inner turmoil and fear of a homosexual's life,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. “All your dreams, your plans, everything falls apart. The whole foundation of your life crumbles. You can either stay the course or follow your heart and go where every human being dreams of — to happiness forever.”
