Theodore Frelinghuysen Dwight (June 11, 1846 – February 3, 1917) was an American librarian, archivist, and diplomat who was a member of Boston's elite homosexual subculture in the late 19th century.

[1] From 1865 until 1869, Theodore Dwight attended Rochester Collegiate Institute and paid his way through school by working in a wholesale saddlery and hardware store.

Around 1869, Dwight moved from Rochester to San Francisco, where he lived at 256 Bush Street and worked as a bookkeeper for the Pacific Union Express Company.

Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Dwight became a member of the local literary scene that included such established writers as Bret Harte, Ina Coolbrith, and Charles Warren Stoddard.

[5] His place in the local arts and letters scene was recognized when in January 1872 he was elected a trustee of the San Francisco Mercantile Library Association.

[7] In 1875, Dwight left Putnam’s and moved to Washington, D.C., where he served briefly as a literary assistant to the American historian George Bancroft.

He reported to the Senate that the papers "are the veritable records of our history, and are as worthy of a place among the national archives as those of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton.

"[14] He left Boston within a year and spent the summer of 1893 in Rome, Italy, where he represented Isabella Stewart Gardner on acquiring a number of items from the famous 1892 Borghese Collection sale handled by the Italian dealer Vincenzo Menozzi.

The Boston Globe opined: How any young man with such a brilliant future before him as librarian of an institution like the new Boston public library could voluntarily throw so glittering a prospect aside is what passes the comprehension of the layman, who can appreciate the social and literary standing which the librarianship must necessarily give any man.

In 1895, within months of his departure from the Boston Public Library, Dwight published two hefty volumes of Civil War History for the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, of which he was a member: Campaigns in Virginia 1861-1862, The Virginia Campaign of 1862 Under General Pope and Critical Sketches of Some of the Federal and Confederate Commanders.

[17] With his reputation as a librarian ruined in Boston, Dwight wrote to his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner on August 27, 1894, that he had no prospects there, but might move to Chicago and seek work there.

"My efforts to be patient & cheerful usually end in failure," he wrote to Gardner, a reference to the emotional problems that Adams and others had noted off and on for years.

[25] Though the exact nature of his duties are unclear, they almost certainly included proofreading and editorial work on Adams’s History of the United States.

In Havana, the two men attended a bull fight, a carnavale mascarade, and the opera, but ultimately found the city to be too noisy and, in Adam's opinion, a "gay ruin".

After moving to Boston to serve the Adams family, Dwight took up residence in a gentleman's rooming house at 10 Charles Street where his lover, the writer and dramatist Thomas Russell Sullivan, also lived.

[33][34] Dwight corresponded quite openly with Isabella Stewart Gardner about his impulses and affairs, writing in one letter to her: You would be amused could you know how in my secret thoughts of late I have been chiefly engaged in trying to penetrate my own disguise to find the real Dwight, for it is really ridiculous that I should all unconsciously have played a part so well as to deceive so many intelligent and respectable people.

who has departed this house and sails for your shores in two days... Sturgis Bigelow, M.D., has come in with hypnotic influence and carries me off to dine with him to-night with the resident literati and tutti Frutti... Don’t keep our librarian away too long.

[36]Dwight and Sullivan were also frequently guests at W. Sturgis Bigelow's male-only nudist colony on remote Tuckernuck Island, though membership was not strictly limited to homosexuals.

In a letter to his friend Charles Warren Stoddard, Dwight bragged that he had gotten the photographs through U.S. Customs without being detected, thus preventing "confiscation and imprisonment".

While we were talking who should come in but a very handsome, black haired & mustachioed Italian, quite stout built, broad shouldered, perhaps 24 years old, who seemed anxious to be noticed & very much in command of the place; & presently I learned that he was Vincenzo Goldi (sic) the subject of so many of our pictures.

He posed for those in sitting posture on the wall, with a fillet round his head & with Edoard, the more beautiful youth, in an infinite number of others.

[39]In another letter to her, Dwight described the breakup of an unidentified love affair, writing "...the period has come to that little romance in which I was so foolish as to indulge.