He has long credited two teachers at Gonzales High School—Diana Sevario Welch and Sherry Rushing—for inspiring his interest in academic achievement.
in 1962 from Louisiana State University, where he majored in English Literature and served as editor of Delta, the undergraduate literary journal.
[1] In addition to their work together organizing the conference series and editing the collections of essays from them, Summers and Pebworth also collaborated on a number of significant essays on such seventeenth-century figures as John Donne and Henry Vaughan, as well as an edition of the poems of Owen Felltham (1973) and a monograph on Ben Jonson (1979; revised 1999).
Auden, Gore Vidal, Willa Cather, Mary Renault, Richard Howard, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield, and William Shakespeare, and on topics relating to Renaissance constructions of homosexuality; books on Christopher Isherwood (1979) and E.M. Forster (1983), a collection of essays on Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context (1992), and his study of the fictional representation of male homosexuals by gay men and lesbians, Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall (1992).
At the heart of Summers' critical and historical publications—whether on seventeenth-century poetry or on modern gay fiction—is a concern with the intersection of literature and politics, broadly construed.
That is, he is conscious that literature is influenced by socio-political concerns, and also that it frequently helps shape the political and social issues to which it responds.
From 2002 until 2015, Summers was general editor of glbtq.com, an online encyclopedia that presented detailed biographies of notable gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, as well as essays on lgbt history and culture.
Among the topics he has written about have been the jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, essayist Joseph Epstein, and America's openly gay ambassadors.