Bruce Bastian, founder of WordPerfect Corporation, whose word processor was the favorite 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 years old.
Michael Marriott, executive director of the BW Bastian Foundation, said the cause was complications from pulmonary fibrosis.
Mr. Bastian was finishing a master’s degree 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 grandson of David O. McKay, the powerful former president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Mr. Bastian and Mr. Ashton were at the forefront of making computers more productive for everyday tasks. Years later, they became rivals in the legal battle over same-sex marriage.
Highly customizable, with a toll-free customer support line, WordPerfect has emerged from a crowded market of cutting-edge word processors as the top choice of new PC users. (Among its fans was Philip Roth, who used it until he retired in 2012, long after the program was replaced in popularity by Microsoft Word.)
“WordPerfect had a reputation for being very user-friendly,” Matthew Kirschenbaum, 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 given to the document you were writing, as opposed to many menus and the software device.”
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 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. she’s a little weird,” wrote Personal Computing magazine in a 1988 cover story about the company. “At 4,000 feet above sea level, Utah’s Great Basin isn’t exactly the seat of high technology. The air in Orem is dry in December, the snow that falls on the Wasatch Front east of Salt Lake City is what expert powder skiers crave.
The location of the company was not the only strange thing.
“There is another thing that distinguishes this high-tech company from most others,” the magazine noted. “Like two-thirds of Utah’s population, most WordPerfect employees are Mormon.”
This included both of its founders – one of whom harbors a secret that has been tormenting him.
In 1976, Mr. Bastian married his best friend, Melanie Laycock. They eventually had four sons. But all along, he later said in interviews, Mr. Bastian knew he was gay.
Sometime in the late 1980s, while on a business trip to Amsterdam, she kissed another man.
“When I came 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 so transformative and so difficult. I walk in the door and I see my little boys and I just thought, “Hey, jeez. What 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. Its amazing.”
Mr. Bastian came out publicly a few years later and withdrew his name from the records of the Mormon Church. He received anonymous emails from people expressing their disgust at his sexuality. However, he felt liberated.
“It was such a relief that we actually don’t have to lie anymore,” he said on the “Mormon Stories” podcast.
But there was a problem with production in WordPerfect’s 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 emerging Microsoft Windows platform. Microsoft also integrated Word into its suite of productivity programs, Microsoft Office, which quickly captured 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 world.
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 championed LGBTQ causes and joined the board 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 banning same-sex marriage. Mr Ashton contributed $1 million.
“I wanted to make sure the future was good for my children and grandchildren,” she told The Salt Lake Tribune. “That’s why I gave.”
Mr. Bastian contributed $1 million to opposition efforts.
The episode, he said, made him feel 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 farm and was also a musician. His mother, Una (Davis) Bastian, ran the household.
He majored in music education at Brigham Young University, graduating in 1975. He was the university’s band director and, with Mr. Ashton, wrote a program that helped choreograph performances. He received his master’s degree in computer science in 1978.
In 1985, the Orem-Geneva Times noted the local company’s success.
“It is hard to believe,” the paper wrote, “that a company with such humble beginnings could become one of the most important competitors (if not the largest) in the microcomputer word processing industry.”
Mr. Bastian and his wife divorced in 1993. He died in 2016.
She married Clint Ford in 2018.
Mr. Ford survives him, as do 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 terrifying and hopeful.
“I don’t think straight people can begin to imagine the inner turmoil and fear right now in a gay person’s life,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. “All your dreams, your plans, everything falls apart. All the foundations of your life are crumbling. You can stay the course or follow your heart and go where every man dreams of going – to happily ever after.”
