Brooke Lynn Hytes

Brooke Lynn Hytes is the stage name of Brock Edward Hayhoe (born March 10, 1986), a Canadian-American drag queen, ballet dancer, and television personality. After working as a dancer with Cape Town City Ballet and Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Brooke Lynn Hytes achieved international recognition for competing on the eleventh season of RuPaul's Drag Race; Brooke Lynn Hytes placed second, only to winner Yvie Oddly. Brooke Lynn Hytes is the first Canadian to compete in the series. Since 2020, Brooke Lynn Hytes has been a main judge on the spin-off series Canada's Drag Race, and is the first Drag Race contestant to become a full-time judge in the franchise.

Early life
Hayhoe was born on March 10, 1986, in Toronto. He attended high school at Etobicoke School of the Arts. When he was 15, he was accepted into the National Ballet School of Canada, where he trained for five years. As a student, he worked with the choreographers Jiri Kylian, Toer van Schayk, James Kudelka, and Rudi van Dantzig, who cast him as Death's Angel in a mounting of Four Last Songs. Hayhoe danced this role in Toronto and later in Cape Town.

Career
In 2006, at 20 years old, Hayhoe moved to South Africa and joined the corps de ballet of the Cape Town City Ballet. In 2007, he was promoted to the rank of soloist. While in Cape Town, he danced several of the major classical principal male roles, including the Nutcracker Prince in The Nutcracker, Solor in La Bayadère, and Albrecht in Giselle.

Hayhoe was more interested in dancing en pointe than in the traditional male roles. He moved to New York City in 2008 in order to join the drag ballet troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. He toured internationally with the Trocks for four years under the names 'Andrei Verikose', as a male dancer, and 'Vanya Verikosa', his ballerina alter ego. As a drag queen, Hayhoe initially tried out the names Jackie D, Carmen and Bianca. After moving back to Toronto to pursue drag full-time, he was adopted by local queen Farra N. Hyte, who named her new drag daughter Brooke Lynn Hytes. Shortly after returning to Toronto, Brooke Lynn Hytes won a local drag pageant called Queen of Halloween, and quickly began to attract attention in the Toronto drag scene.

Brooke Lynn Hytes began to regularly compete on the drag pageant circuit. In 2013, she won Miss Gay Toronto, Derby City Entertainer of the Year, and Miss Michigan Continental, and placed as first alternate in the National Entertainer of the Year and Miss Continental pageants on first entry. In 2014, Brooke Lynn Hytes won the prestigious Miss Continental title. In 2015, Brooke Lynn Hytes accepted a residency as a performer in PLAY Dance Bar in Nashville, Tennessee. She auditioned for the ninth and tenth seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race, but was unable to join either season as she did not yet have a green card. Brooke Lynn Hytes was announced to be one of fifteen contestants competing on season eleven of Drag Race on January 24, 2019. She won the main challenges in episode one, five and eleven, placing in the top of a challenge a record-breaking nine times throughout the season. This is the most top 3 positions achieved by any contestant in a single season in RuPaul's Drag Race history. She was in a "double-shantay" alongside Yvie Oddly in the Snatch Game episode after bombing her Celine Dion impersonation; the duo's lip sync to Demi Lovato's "Sorry Not Sorry" was lauded over by critics, and declared by many to be one of the best lip syncs in the history of the series.

Throughout the season, Brooke Lynn Hytes developed an on-show romance with Vanessa Vanjie Mateo, dubbed "Branjie". The two placed in the bottom two of episode twelve, with Brooke Lynn Hytes emerging victorious in a lip sync battle to Aretha Franklin's "A Deeper Love", making Vanessa Vanjie Mateo the last queen to be eliminated prior to the finale. Brooke Lynn Hytes finished as a runner-up, ultimately losing to Yvie Oddly in the final lip sync for the crown. In June 2019, Brooke Lynn Hytes was one of 37 queens to be featured on the cover of New York magazine. On November 11, she won a People's Choice Award for "Most Hypeworthy Canadian". On September 26, 2019, Brooke Lynn Hytes was announced as a full-time judge for Canada's Drag Race, the Canadian spin-off of RuPaul's Drag Race. She was the first contestant from any series in the Drag Race franchise to become a full-time judge. As of 2024, Brooke Lynn Hytes is the only judge to have appeared on all four seasons of Canada's Drag Race, as well as its spin-off, Canada's Drag Race: Canada vs The World. She and her fellow judges have won three Canadian Screen Awards for Best Host or Presenter in a Factual or Reality/Competition Series, in 2021, 2022, and 2023 respectively.

On March 25, 2021, Brooke Lynn Hytes released a single featuring Priyanka, the winner of Canada's Drag Race season one, titled "Queen of the North". She has since expressed her dislike of the single, and her reluctance to release any more music. In May 2021, Brooke Lynn Hytes launched a podcast with Priyanka, Famous This Week, and was announced as the host of 1 Queen 5 Queers, a reboot of 1 Girl 5 Gays, for Crave. The second season of 1 Queen 5 Queers premiered in 2022.

In June 2021, Brooke Lynn Hytes appeared as a 'lip-sync assassin' on the sixth season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, and lipsynced to the song 'Miss You Much' against contestant Rajah O'Hara, one of her former Drag Race competitors. The result of the lip-sync was declared a draw. In May 2022, Brooke Lynn Hytes appeared alongside Vanessa Vanjie Mateo in Bluebella's Pride Month lingerie campaign.

Brooke Lynn Hytes continues to make international club appearances, and regularly tours alongside other Drag Race alumni. In 2019 she joined the Voss Events RuPaul's Drag Race Season Eleven tour, which visited seventeen cities across North America. In 2020 she hosted a tour for the Canada's Drag Race season one queens, which played exclusively in drive-in venues due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022 she hosted the Canada's Drag Race Tour again, headlined by the season two queens. In 2024, she is scheduled to co-host the Canada's Drag Race Tour alongside Jaida Essence Hall, headlined by the season three and four queens. In 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, Brooke Lynn Hytes joined the annual Murray & Peter tour A Drag Queen Christmas, branded as the longest-running drag queen tour in America.

Personal life
Hayhoe came out as gay when he was 18. After his stint on RuPaul's Drag Race, Hayhoe moved first to Los Angeles, where he took over Bianca Del Rio's old apartment, and then to Chicago. On May 22, 2023, via his Instagram page, Hayhoe posted a photograph showing both a Canadian and an American passport, thus confirming he had become a naturalized U.S. citizen.