Gorgeous Dre (Andre Taylor)

American Pimp participant convicted federally in 2000, who after his brother's 2016 police killing became Seattle's best-known police-accountability activist.

Andre Taylor appeared in the Hughes brothers' American Pimp (1999) as Gorgeous Dre, a Los Angeles-raised pimp who, by his own description, sold refinement rather than flash. His later life is more thoroughly documented than that of almost any other man in the film, because he became a public figure in Seattle. The Seattle Times reported in 2018 that he had been sentenced in Las Vegas in 2000 to more than five years in prison and served slightly more than one year. In a 2017 Love + Radio episode, "Seventy Weeks" (produced by Nick van der Kolk, Brendan Baker, Alexander Jerri and Nick Williams), Taylor gives his own version: prosecuted under the Mann Act and for money laundering, refusing a plea, seeing four counts dismissed, and serving eight months in state custody followed by twelve months federal, released in 2001. His own websites say the charges came in 1997 while he was consulting on the film. The archive records the Seattle Times figures as the verified ones and his account as his account.

Taylor's testimony about his entry into the trade is unusually candid about the women involved. He says his father was a pimp and his mother a prostitute; that he was ordained a minister at eighteen after a teenage conversion; that at seventeen he fathered children with two adult women and was pressed by his church into marriage; and that in September 1991, needing money, he took up his father's profession. He describes his method as psychological rather than violent—"fundamentals" over force—which is the trade's standard self-description and should be read as such. After prison he rebuilt himself as a speaker and "life coach," a label he told Love + Radio he chose because "preacher" would have closed doors. He appeared on The Montel Williams Show in May 2007, published a memoir, The Road to Paradise, and produced a self-released follow-up documentary, Master of the Game.

On 21 February 2016, his brother Che Taylor, 47, was shot and killed by two plainclothes Seattle police officers who said they believed he was armed. Andre Taylor founded Not This Time, a group that connects families of people killed by police with lawmakers, and led the campaign for Initiative 940, which gathered more than 350,000 signatures and, after a legislative compromise, changed Washington's police deadly-force law in 2018. The Seattle Times headlined its profile "From breaking laws to making laws." In 2024 the city settled the Che Taylor wrongful-death suit for $1.5 million after evidence undercut the officers' claim that he was armed; Taylor called it "an admission of guilt."

The 2020 protests made him briefly national news. During the Capitol Hill Organized Protest he urged demonstrators to leave at night after shootings there, telling KUOW the zone would "only be remembered as a place where violence occurred." PubliCola then reported that the city had signed a $150,000 contract (June 2020, $12,500 a month) for him to provide "community safety de-escalation services" as a so-called street czar; Fox News and others ran the story under "ex-pimp" headlines. In 2021 he released a hip-hop project, Many Shades of Dre, revisiting his past. His is the clearest case in the archive of a pimp's biography continuing into documented civic life, with the harm of the earlier chapter neither erased nor, in the record, fully accounted for.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Andre Lavon Taylor (also styled Andrè Taylor)

BORN
Los Angeles area (San Fernando Valley), c. 1969 — per his own accounts and a 2018 Seattle Times age

STATUS
Living

ERA
1991–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
Los Angeles; Las Vegas; Seattle; American Pimp (1999); Not This Time; Initiative 940

STANDING
Documented