I'm glad to say that I'm in a rather odd situation regarding the demographics around me, especially in regard to Tolkien. I'm at a relatively small undergraduate engineering school (
Rose-Hulman, for those interested), and as such, the demographic definitely tends towards the somewhat geeky and nerdy.
And luckily, hand in hand with that seems to come a pretty widespread love for Tolkien. I do agree that there are many Tolkien fans who wouldn't be considered nerdy or geeky, but I can say with confidence that now that living in an area with a higher percentage of nerds and geeks does improve the odds of the next person you see being a Tolkien fan.
Just as an example of how nice it is to live in a place with Tolkien fans a-plenty: As many of you probably know, Battle for Middle Earth 2 recently came out, and while it does have some content I take canonical issues with, it does provide a fun way to recreate the land of Middle Earth. Naturally, those of us who are fans thought it seemed interesting, and we therefore managed to get copies for ourselves, and we've since proceeded to recreate legendary battle after legendary battle over out LAN. I don't just mean that we've thrown together armies of elves and orcs and thrown them at eachother (which we have done), but also that we select maps and intentionally recreate actual 'historical' Tolkien battles.
And the best part? We all just sit there and drool over the fact that we're playing with elves. After just one of us installed it, we crowded around his laptop and waxed giddy over the idea of experiencing a battle of Middle-Earth; and not just because we like computer games, but because we all find ME cool.
It's nice living amongst people of similar interests.
Oh, and being able to tell a Tolkien joke at lunch and having everyone laugh is a wonderful thing.
But back to topic, even though we do have those similar threads amongst us, geekiness and Tolkien, I will say that we vary in many other ways. We all like different music, have different majors, and even have different tastes in regards to other literature. I guess Tolkien's writing power, while it may tend towards certain demographics, definitely has the ability to bridge the gap and appeal greatly to people of very different tastes.