In Homage to the Brave ones who we record.

Cafe Locked Out

COVID stole our identity because cultural identity is built on stories in which the majority of us can be the heroes.
But in COVID we weren’t heroes.
We weren’t Crocodile Dundee, we weren’t the Gallipoli soldiers.
We were frightened sheep.
Now because we have no communal identity, they are trying to laminate our loss with a new story — a truth where women support men’s right to enter women’s spaces, to the detriment of women, and children are born in the wrong body — but in this story we are again required to be cowards.
Silent ones.
That’s why people like you are important.
The ones who challenge this.
For you are standing up to the true oppression we face— the one where they are trying to convince us that we and our children are worthless.
Kelli and I, under our platform, Cafe Locked Out, are continuing to record the real stories of real people .
Stories of suffering, of reliance and defiance, of people making their own choices and living with the consequences.
Heroic Stories. Stories that are not only worth capturing, but have the strength and heart to rebuild a new cultural identity upon.
~Kelli & Michael Gray Griffith