In HIV and AIDS and life skills education in southern Africa peer education has been advocated as a way of democratizing relations between educators and students and encouraging participatory pedagogies. But what makes a peer educator, or rather how do people make themselves peer educators? Similarities in terms of age, social status and background do not automatically result in teachers and students identifying as peers and engaging in participatory teaching and learning. This paper focuses on an interview with men and women in their 20s who were identified as peer educators and taught life skills education to children in a "black" high school. How did they, as full-time paid employees several years older than their students working for a Christian organization, construct themselves as peers in relation to the male and female students they taught? It is argued that this involved contradictory ways of relating to students, moralistic and student-centred, and that they subverted and reproduced conventional gendered identities.