PMM Reviewer Mentee Spotlight: Ricky Granderson on Platonic Intimacy and Masculine Norms

We are excited to spotlight Ricky Granderson, a 2025 mentee in the Psychology of Men and Masculinities (PMM) Reviewer Mentorship Program. Ricky is a Ph.D. candidate in the Basic and Applied Social Psychology Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His research explores how men form, maintain, and understand platonic intimacy, particularly through practices of physical touch—and how those practices are shaped by cultural narratives around masculinity.

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ricky about his experience in the PMM mentorship program, the mentors who went above and beyond, and how the program supported his long-standing interest in bringing psychology into real-world spaces.

How would you describe your experience in the PMM reviewer mentorship program?

The experience was exactly as advertised — with a couple of little treats hidden inside!

I expected, and thoroughly enjoyed, the opportunity to learn and apply the different approaches leaders in the field of men and masculinities take to reviewing manuscripts. As I prepare to conduct my first post-mentorship PMM review, I find myself drawing on each of these experiences as I develop my own review processes and style. I also got a lot out of the regularly scheduled chats with Dr. Joel Wong about the editorial process, which were informative as an academic who seeks to publish future work in PMM, as an aspiring member of PMM’s editorial board, and as someone with a deep interest in science communication beyond the academy.

What surprised me was how open the mentors I encountered were to engaging with me beyond the parameters of the program—additional meetings, practical and informational support as I dipped my toe into the academic job market, and putting me in contact with other scholars in their network are just a few of the ways the PMM mentors went above and beyond in their interactions with me throughout the program. I owe them a sincere debt of gratitude and look forward to staying in contact with some of them for years to come.

What advice would you give to the next set of trainees in the program?

Two things. First, I would advise them to approach their reviews fearlessly—but from a place of humility. Be honest about what you think, and don’t be afraid to make strong (but polite and well-argued) critiques or own your areas of expertise as you review manuscripts. At the same time, be clear and upfront about the limits of your knowledge and understanding in your interactions with your mentors (as it’s a safe space to ask and learn from “dumb questions”) and in your reviews (as it might be an opportunity for the authors to expand on or clarify their thinking).

Second, I would advise them to be open and honest about what they want and need to make the experience work for them. For example, while I was only required to meet with my mentors once per manuscript, I asked to meet with all of my mentors at least twice—once before I reviewed the manuscript, to connect with them and get a sense of how they approach reviewing manuscripts, and then again after I reviewed the manuscript, to discuss and get feedback on the content of my review. I did this because I was clear-eyed about my desire to go beyond getting feedback on my own review process and expose myself to—and apply—the approaches taken by leaders in the field. In another example, when I broke a finger on my dominant hand at the tail end of the program, I let my PMM mentor know upfront that the proposed deadline would be too tight for me, as I was still playing catch-up on my own work, and they were happy to accommodate me. So… speak up for yourself and make this experience the experience you want it to be!

How did your journey lead you to pursue research on Men & Masculinities?

I think I have always been attuned to the peculiarities of how men connect and relate to one another—which only became more salient (and peculiar!) as I began to come into myself as a gay man and experience what it meant to love another man in practice, and how different that was from the way I was taught to love by the women in my life. This sparked some of my early work exploring the different ways gay men organized their romantic relationships and their motivations for choosing certain structures over others, as well as my undergraduate thesis investigating how African American gay men living and dating on a predominantly white campus thought about love, sex, intimacy, and desire.

This line of work naturally dovetailed into a career in public health, where I began to explore the implications of these ideas for sexual minority men’s health and well-being. It was here that I first started to think about masculinity as an identity—one that the men in my community and the communities I studied seemed to simultaneously prize, loathe, embody, and actively subvert. After nearly a decade of work in the sexual health space began to take its toll on me, I decided to pivot.

Somewhere in the process of figuring out exactly where I wanted to pivot, I found myself in an environment where economic shocks, labor market trends, and progress won by queer and feminist movements had reignited questions about masculinity, what it means to be a man, and the acceptable boundaries of male behavior. In Suicide, Durkheim reminds us that abrupt changes in the existing social order, just or unjust, create the conditions for anomic alienation—a condition that seemed readily apparent among young American men, as evidenced by decreases in life expectancy, increases in radicalization into extremist reactionary movements, and upticks in substance use, suicide, social isolation, and “deaths of despair.”

Inspired by a desire to ameliorate these trends, Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets, and my own incredibly close (and peculiar!) relationship with a heterosexual male friend, I began thinking about ways to unwind the patterns of disinvestment and underutilization that have left men’s homosocial platonic lives threadbare. That’s how I found myself exploring patterns and practices of physical touch in men’s friendships.

All of this is a really long way to say “me-search” led me to pursue research on men and masculinities, but I don’t know if we’re allowed to just say that anymore.

What are the next steps in your development as a psychologist?

As I stare down the light at the end of the tunnel that is my social psychology Ph.D. program, I find myself very interested in the engagement with and application of psychology beyond the academy. I’ve got many ideas of what that could, should, and will look like, but the most immediate next step for my development as a psychologist is to complete my dissertation! We’ll see where life takes me from there.

Ricky M. Granderson, M.P.H., M.Phil.

Ph.D. Candidate, Basic and Applied Social
Psychology
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
rgranderson@gradcenter.cuny.edu