WATCH: The NastyPig Ad Time Warner Didn’t Want You to See

A 30-second commercial for gay-owned clothing company NastyPig was deemed "too hot for TV" by executives at Time Warner Cable, reports Gawker.

The spot, cheekily titled "Give/Receive" keeps with the hypermasculine, unabashedly out and sexy image NastyPig has cultivated since it was first founded by CEO David Lauterstein and his then-boyfriend (now-husband and creative director) Fred Kearney. The commercial doesn't actually show any of the musclebound men exchanging saliva (or any other bodily fluids, for that matter), but it's clear what (or who) the attendees of the holiday party are about to get into in the ad.

Gawker reports that the ad ran on Time Warner Cable in New York markets last week, but then was unceremoniously pulled from the air.

The original ad buy, coordinated by Tara Wolf at Wolf Media, Inc. and reportedly agreed upon by Time Warner Cable, had the commercial slated to air numerous times on Viacom's gay network Logo, as well as on TBS during Family Guy, American Dad, and The Big Bang Theory, during Cartoon Network's airings of Family Guy and American Dad, and on Lifetime during Project Runway.

But after airing just four times on Logo, Time Warner Cable stopped running the ad, telling Wolf the spot was "not appropriate," according to emails obtained by Gawker. While those emails didn't include a precise explanation as to why the ad was deemed inappropriate, they did acknowledge that the ad's "content is the issue," claiming Time Warner Cable received at least one consumer complaint about the ad.

"The holiday spot is edgy, and we take customer complaints seriously," wrote an unnamed Time Warner Cable executive in one of the emails to Wolf obtained by Gawker. "I apologize again. I know this puts you in a bad spot."

Time Warner Cable issued an official statement about the incident on Friday: "Proper guidelines were not followed in this instance; we made a mistake. We are sorry and we will work with this client to make it right."

Just last month, Time Warner Cable aired a NastyPig ad without issue, though as Gawker notes, that spot's actors were all fully dressed. A representative at Time Warner Cable would not confirm to Gawker how many complaints the company received about the risque ad.

Of course, now that the ad has been banned, it's likely to get even greater exposure than it would have had it just run on the gay-centric and adult-focused shows it was slated to appear between. That wasn't Lauterstein's objective, he told Gawker.

"I just wanted to make a commercial that represented my brand and the customers we sell to," Lauterstein told Gawker. "We never intentionally made this commercial with the thought of being banned just to get press. We gave them plenty of time to offer edits as we knew this commercial might be strong for television. You can't do stuff like this for press. That's why there's an approval process. You can't do sensational things on non-live TV. That's why they have a standards board, to prevent situations like this."

While Time Warner Cable representatives denied repeated requests from Gawker to expand on the reason the ad was banned -- and outright refused to answer a question about whether homophobia played a role in the decision --Gawker's Rich Juzwiak draws conclusions that don't seem particularly far-fetched:

"We've seen plenty of half-naked people on TV selling things like underwear and condoms," Juzwiak writes. "We've never, though, seen a bunch of guys in a commercial behaving in a way that suggests they just might all fuck after those 30 seconds end, and feel great about themselves and each other after. The ad is audacious and meant to grab attention, but why? Is it because it is outrageously sexual by any standard, or is it because we're still not used to seeing men socialize in this manner on TV? Is Time Warner calling the bluff of an ad that was tailored to be just short of too hot for TV, or is the company expressing preemptive discomfort on behalf of the public because Americans don't like when gays act gay?"

Judge for yourself by watching the now-banned ad below.