the elephant in the room no one talks about

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It was deliberate. The imagery is pretty obvious to anyone who's smart enough to realize the openly gay director's output was influenced by his sexuality. See link and scroll down to Eisensten.

http://community.middlebury.edu/~moss/RGC1.html

"For an analysis of homoerotic images in his films (remember the cannons in Potemkin?) see Thomas Waugh, "A Fag Spotter's Guide to Eisenstein," Body Politic, no. 35 (July/August 1977). Some of Eisenstein's erotic drawings were published in Literaturnoe obozrenie: Erotika v russkoi literature (1992)"

There's also:

http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-bergan180205.htm


However, the one aspect of The Battleship Potemkin that has never aroused any censorship is Eisenstein's mischievous homoeroticism, which is more evident to modern audiences than ever. In the 1980s, Nestor Almendros, the exiled Cuban cinematographer, wrote: 'From its very beginning, with the sailors' dormitory prologue, we see an "all-male cast" resting shirtless in their hammocks. The camera lingers on the rough, splendidly built men, in a series of shots that anticipate the sensuality of Mapplethorpe, and at the great moment when the cannons are raised to fire, a sort of visual ballet of multiple slow and pulsating erections can easily be discerned.'

Although subjective, Almendros, and other gay commentators, cannot be accused of special pleading. Eisenstein was a self-confessed phallic obsessive. Knowing this, it is not unlikely that Eisenstein was slyly playing with the slowly rising guns as well as the scenes with sailors polishing pistons in a masturbatory manner.

There are also the fleeting shots of a young man tearing his shirt in fury to reveal his bare chest (a young monk has his shirt torn off him in Ivan The Terrible) and of two sailors obviously kissing as the cannons rise. None of this was lost on the sophisticated festival audience, who gave the performance (film plus orchestra) a standing ovation.

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I think that phalluses appear regardless of the sexual identity of the director. Those big guns on the ship, so lovingly swabbed and polished, literally and figuratively represent the destructive and oppressive power of the government that builds and deploys them. The rifles with fixed bayonets are held at crotch level by the soldiers advancing down the Steps and are the same thing. Whether these images are presented consciously or otherwise, they are there, operating on us viewers on several levels. There re, after all, times when a cigar is NOT "just a cigar."

"Sometimes the cigar is just a cigar," as Freud said.

However, Freudian criticisms and the topic of homoeroticism have been explored with this film. When we studied this flick in a Film Theory class I took, we certainly touched on them. However, psychoanalytic theory is still just one of many different critical approaches you could take. All different schools of criticism have the potential to provide new insights, though personally, I take psychoanalysis with a grain of salt.

Do you really imagine that being a virgin is incompatible with being homo-sexual?