The people who will inevitably say things like "this is just oversensitivity" or "it's an exaggeration to act like a whole city is outside your comfort zone" are either unbelievably thick-skinned or simply live in a relatively insulated, homogenous environment. I'm a straight white married upper-middle-class man and there are decidedly places I feel very uncomfortable in the country (I am thinking of highly conservative small towns in the mountain west in my particular case, where I stand out visually). You might not visit them very often, but those places are real and the feeling of being an outsider is palpable. I can only imagine how much more influential that feeling would be if I were a minority in any way, not to mention one of the minorities it's still nearly de rigueur to overtly discriminate against.