Bruce Bastian, founder of WordPerfect Corporation, whose word processor was the preferred writing tool 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, California. He was 76.
Michael Marriott, executive director of the BW Bastian Foundation, said the cause was complications from pulmonary fibrosis.
Mr. Bastian was finishing his graduate studies at Brigham Young University in the late 1970s when he founded the company that became WordPerfect with Alan C. Ashton, his computer science professor and the 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 were at the forefront of making computers more productive for everyday tasks. Years later, they became adversaries in the legal battle over gay marriage.
Highly customizable and with a toll-free customer support line, WordPerfect emerged from a crowded market of new word processors as the preferred choice of new personal computer users (its fans included Philip Roth, who used it until he retired in 2012, long after the program had been superseded in popularity by Microsoft Word).
“WordPerfect had a reputation for being very easy to 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, rather than a lot of menus and the rest of the software’s bells and whistles.”
Bastian wrote much of the software’s code, while Ashton handled the business side. By 1991, the company controlled 50 percent of the word-processing market and generated more than $500 million in sales. 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 oddity,” Personal Computing magazine wrote in a cover story about the company in 1988. “At 4,000 feet above sea level, Utah’s Great Basin is not exactly a high-tech hotbed. The air in Orem is dry in December, the snow falling on the Wasatch Front east of Salt Lake City is the powdery fluff that expert skiers crave.”
The location of the company was not the only oddity.
“There is another thing 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.”
That included both founders, one of whom was harboring a secret that tormented him.
In 1976, Bastian married his best friend, Melanie Laycock. They had four children, but, as he later told interviewers, Bastian always knew he was gay.
In the late 1980s, during a business trip to Amsterdam, she kissed another man.
“When I came back to Utah, I was a mess,” Bastian said in an interview with Outwords, an organization that records oral histories about the LGBTQ movement. “It was a transformative experience and very difficult. I walked in the door and saw my little kids and thought, ‘Uh, God. What am I going to do?’”
He told his wife a few days later.
“We tried to make it work,” he told Outwords. “I tried to be gay and Mormon at the same time. That’s impossible.”
A few years later, Bastian publicly came out as gay and removed his name from Mormon Church records. He received anonymous emails from people expressing disgust at his sexuality. Still, he felt liberated.
“It was a huge relief not to have to lie anymore,” she told the Mormon Stories podcast.
But trouble was brewing in the WordPerfect business.
The company’s software dominated the market for computers running the MS-DOS operating system, but it was slow to release a version for the emerging Microsoft Windows platform. Microsoft also included Word in its productivity software suite, Microsoft Office, which quickly took market share away from WordPerfect.
In 1994, Bastian and Ashton sold their privately held company to Novell for $1.4 billion. Novell subsequently sold the software to Corel, which is now known as Alludo. WordPerfect still has a loyal following in the legal world.
Bastian left the company after the announcement of the sale to Novell. Through his foundation, he became a major philanthropist, funding cultural and arts programs throughout Utah. He also supported LGBTQ causes and joined the board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ rights advocacy group.
In 2008, the Mormon Church urged its members to financially support the passage of Proposition 8, a ballot measure in California banning same-sex marriage. Ashton contributed $1 million.
“I wanted to make sure the future is good for my children and grandchildren,” she told The Salt Lake Tribune. “That’s why I made my donation.”
Mr. Bastian contributed $1 million to opposition efforts.
The episode, he said, left him feeling betrayed by 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, took care of the home.
He majored in music education at Brigham Young University, graduating in 1975. He served as director of the university’s marching band and, with Ashton, wrote a program that helped choreograph performances. He earned his master’s degree in computer science in 1978.
In 1985, The Orem-Geneva Times noted the success of the local company.
“It is hard to believe,” the paper wrote, “that a company with such humble beginnings could become one of the leading (if not the leading) competitors in the microcomputer word processing industry.”
Mr. Bastian and his wife divorced in 1993. She passed away in 2016.
She 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 a terrifying and hopeful experience at the same time.
“I don’t think straight people can even imagine the confusion and fear that a gay person’s life feels like right now,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. “All your dreams, plans, everything falls apart. The whole foundation of your life falls apart. You can either stay the course or follow your heart and go where every human being dreams of going: eternal happiness.”
