BRUCE WAYNE BASTIAN, born on this date, (d: 6/16/24), was an American computer programmer, businessperson, and philanthropist. He co-founded WordPerfect (originally known as Satellite Software International) with Alan Ashton in 1978.

He was raised as a Mormon, and he was a missionary in Italy. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Music and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. As an undergraduate, he served as the director of the BYU Cougar Marching Band and developed a software program to help choreograph marching band performances together with Alan Ashton.

Bastian began working for the Eyring Research Institute (ERI) at BYU, and he was soon joined by Ashton to work on a word processor for the city of Orem, Utah. The two worked on a Data General computer. Their collaborative work later became the company known as WordPerfect, founded in 1979. In 1982, they released WordPerfect 2.2 for the IBM Personal Computer. Bastian was the chairman of the board until 1994.

In 1976, Mr. Bastian married his best friend, Melanie Laycock. They eventually had four sons. But all along, he later told interviewers, Mr. Bastian knew he was gay. Sometime in the late 1980s, while on a business trip in 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 about the L.G.B.T.Q. movement. “It was just so transformational and so difficult. I walk in the door and see my little boys and I just thought: ‘Uh, jeez. 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 be a Mormon at the same time. That’s impossible.”

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 about his sexuality. But he felt liberated.

Bastian established the B.W. Bastian Foundation in 1997. As a philanthropist, Bastian supported the LGBT community and the performing arts in Utah. He was a donor to Encircle, the Utah Pride Center, and Equality Utah, whose executive director noted, “No individual has had a greater impact on the lives of LGBTQ Utahns.” In 2003, he donated more than $1 million to the Human Rights Campaign. He served on their board for the next 22 years.

Bastian also provided financial assistance to the Plan-B Theatre Company, the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera, and Ballet West. At the University of Utah, he donated $1.7 million for the renovation of Kingsbury Hall in 1997 and $1.3 million for the purchase of 55 Steinway pianos in 2000. He also supported the LGBT Resource Center on campus. He donated $1 million to the campaign to defeat Proposition 8 in California. Ashton, his former partner donated $1 milliion  in support of the proposition.

In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Bastian to the Presidential Advisory Committee of the Arts in honor of Bastian’s long-term commitment to the arts.

Mr. Bastian and his wife divorced in 1993. She died in 2016. He later married Clint Ford. They resided in Orem, Utah and Palm Springs, California. Bastian died from lung disease on June 16, 2024, at the age of 76.