Bruce Bastian, a Founder of WordPerfect, Is Dead at 76

Bruce Bastian, a founder of the WordPerfect Corporation, whose word processor was the favored tool for writing during the early days of personal computing — and who later, after coming out as gay, renounced his Mormon faith and funded L.G.B.T.Q. causes — died on June 16 at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 76.

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

Mr. Bastian was finishing graduate school 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 a grandson of David O. McKay, the influential former president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, Mr. Bastian and Mr. Ashton were at the forefront of making computers more productive for daily tasks. Years later, they became adversaries in the legal battle over gay marriage.

Highly customizable, with a free customer support line, WordPerfect emerged from a crowded market of upstart word processors as the go-to choice of new personal computer users. (Among its fans was Philip Roth, who used it until he retired in 2012, long after the program was supplanted in popularity by Microsoft Word.)